BRITISH ZOOLOGISTS. 121 



others. They asserted that sometimes the swallows 

 assembled in numbers on a reed, till it broke and sunk 

 with them to the bottom; and that their immersion was 

 preluded by a dirge of a quarter of an hour's length. 

 That others would unite in laying hold of a straw with 

 their bills, and so plunge down in society. Others again 

 would form a large mass, by clinging together with their 

 feet, and so commit themselves to the deep. 



1 Such are the relations given by those that are fond of 

 this opinion, and though delivered without exaggeration, 

 must provoke a smile. They assign not the smallest 

 reason to account for these birds being able to endure so 

 long a submersion without being suffocated, or without 

 decaying, in an element so unnatural to so delicate a bird ; 

 when we know that the otter, the cormorant, and the 

 grebes, soon perish if caught under ice, or entangled in 

 nets; and it is well known that those animals will con- 

 tinue much longer under water than any others to whom 

 nature hath denied that particular structure of heart 

 necessary for a long residence beneath that element.' 



ALEXANDER WILSON. 



Alexander Wilson, ' the American ornithologist,' was 

 the son of a 'wabster,' or weaver, of Paisley, and was 

 born on the 6th of July 1766. Little or nothing is 

 known of his early life, except that his parents cherished 

 the ambition, so common among the Scotch peasantry, 

 of bringing up a son to the church, and that, with this 

 end in view, Alexander Wilson was for a time placed 

 under the charge of Mr Barlas, a student of divinity, from 

 whom we may suppose he acquired some rudiments of 



