198 love's MEINIE. 



lately, ' Cypselus Apus/ ' Footless Capsule.' 

 It is not footless, and there is no sense in calling 

 a bird a capsule because it lives in a hole, 

 (which the Swift does not). The Greeks had 

 a double idea in the word, which it is not the 

 least necessary to keep; and Aristotle's cypselus 

 is not the swift, but the bank-martlet — " they 

 bring up their young in cells made out of clay, 

 long in the entrance." The swift being pre- 

 cisely the one of the Hirundines which does 

 not make its nest of clay, but of miscellaneous 

 straws, threads, and shreds of any adaptable 

 rubbish, which it can snatch from the ground 

 as it stoops on the wing,* or pilfer from any 

 half-ruined nests of other birds. 



' Cotyle ' is only a synonym for Cypselus, 

 enabling ornithologists to become farther unin- 

 telligible. We will be troubled no more either 



* "I have in different times and places opened ten or 

 twelve swifts' nests ; in all of them I found the same materials, 

 and these consisting of a great variety of substances — stalks 

 of corn, dry grass, moss, hemp, bits of cord, threads of silk 

 and linen, the tip of an ermine's tail, small shreds of gauze, 

 of muslin and other light stuffs, the feathers of domestic birds, 

 charcoal, — in short, whatever they can find in the sweepings 

 of towns." — Buffon. 



Belon asserts (Buffon does not venture to guarantee the 

 assertion), that "they will descry a fly at the distance of a 

 quarter of a league " ! 



