clxxxvi LIFE OF WILSON. 



whom heaven has conferred superior powers of wing, must 

 sink into torpidity at the bottom of our rivers, or doze all win- 

 ter in the caverns of the earth. I am myself something of a 

 traveller, and foreign countries afford many novel sights: should 

 I assert, that in some of my peregrinations I had met with a 

 nation of Indians, all of whom, old and young, at the com- 

 mencement of cold weather, descend to the bottom of their 

 lakes and rivers, and there remain until the breaking up of 

 frost; nay, should I affirm, that thousands of people in the 

 neighbourhood of this city, regularly undergo the same semi- 

 annual submersion that I myself had fished up a whole family 

 of these from the bottom of the Schuylkill, where they had lain 

 torpid all winter, carried them home, and brought them all 

 comfortably to themselves again; should I even publish this 

 in the learned pages of the Transactions of our Philosophical 

 Society,* who would believe me? Is then the organization of a 

 swallow less delicate than that of a man? Can a bird, whose vi- 

 tal functions are destroyed by a short privation of pure air, and 

 its usual food, sustain, for six months, a situation where the 

 most robust man would perish in a few hours, or minutes, t 



* Here there is a palpable allusion to a paper on the hybernation of swallows, 

 which was published in the sixth volume of the Transactions of the American 

 Philosophical Society. This paper was written by one Frederick Antes, and 

 was communicated to the Society by the late professor Barton. It is probable 

 that Wilson had also read the " letter on the retreat of house-swallows in win- 

 ter, from the honourable Samuel Dexter, Esq. to the honourable James Bow- 

 doin, Esq. ;" and that ** from the Reverend Mr. Packard to the honourable 

 Samuel Dexter, Esq.," both of them published in the Memoirs of the Ameri- 

 can Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston, vols. 1 and 2. 



Such communications are not calculated to do honour to any learned institu- 

 tion; and they ought to be rejected with scorn and reprehension. 



f Carlisle, in his lecture on muscular motion, observes, that, " animals of 

 the class Mammalia, which hybernate and become torpid in the winter, have at 

 all times a power of subsisting 1 under a confined respiration, which would de- 

 stroy other animals not having this peculiar habit. In all the hybernating 

 .Mammalia there is a peculiar structure of the heart and its principal veins. " 

 Philosophical Transactions for 1805, p. 17. 



" If all birds, except swallows," says Reeve, " are able to survive the win- 



