36 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



panion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, 

 I have made but slender progress in a kind of information 

 to which I have been attached from my childhood. 



As to swallows (hirundines rusticce) being found in a 

 torpid state during the winter in the isle of Wight, or 

 any part of this country, I never heard any such account 

 worth attending to. 1 But a clergyman, of an inquisitive 

 turn, assures me, that, when he was a great boy, some 

 workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church 

 tower early in the spring, found two or three swifts 

 (hirundines apodes) among the rubbish, which were, at first 

 appearance, dead ; but, on being carried towards 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 

 Jie was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, 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 questioning 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 nth, and young martins (hirundines urbicce) 

 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 disappeared with us by the fifth of October? 



1 The supposed torpidity of Swallows and Swifts during the winter months was 

 a subject which interested the author greatly, and he returns to it again and 

 again. [R. B. S.] 



2 The latest date on which I have seen the House-martin was on the 22nd of 

 November, when a small flock passed over Avington Park, in Hampshire, late in 

 the afternoon. Captain G. E. Shelley and I fired several shots at the birds, but 

 they were at too great a height : of the identity of the species there was no 



