42 NATURAL HISTORY 



boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of 

 a church tower early in the spring, found two or three 

 swifts (Hirundmes apodes*} among the rubbish, which 

 were, at first appearance, dead ; but, on being carried 

 toward the fire, revived. He told me that, out of his 

 great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper 

 bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, where they 

 were suffocated. 



Another intelligent person has informed me that, 

 while he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sus- 

 sex, a great fragment of the chalk-cliff fell down one 

 stormy winter on the beach ; and that many people 

 found swallows among the rubbish: but, on my ques- 

 tioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, 

 to my no small disappointment, he answered me in the 

 negative ; but that others assured him they did. 



Young broods of swallows began to appear this year 

 on July the eleventh, and young martins (Hirundines 

 urbica) were then fledged in their nests. Both species 

 will breed again once. For I see by my Fauna of last 

 year, that young broods came forth so late as September 

 the eighteenth. Are not these late hatchings more in 

 favour of hiding than migration? Nay, some young 

 martins remained in their nests last year so late as 

 September the twenty-ninth ; and yet they totally dis- 

 appeared with us by the fifth of October. 



How strange is it, that the swift, which seems to live 

 exactly the same life with the swallow and house- 

 martin, should leave us before the middle of August 

 invariably 3 ! while the latter stay often till the middle 

 of October ; and once I saw numbers of house-martins 

 on the seventh of November 4 . The martins and red- 



3 [Cypselus Apus, ILL.] 



3 In making use of the above remark, under the head of Swift, in the 

 second volume of his British Zoology, 1768, p. 246, Pennant adds : " For 

 these, and several other observations, we owe our acknowledgements to 

 the Reverend Mr. White, of Selborne, Hampshire." E. T. B. 



4 Upwards of a hundred of these birds collected and apparently going 

 off, were seen on the thirteenth of November, 1831, at Dover. W. Y. 



