}\ 



28 The Natural History 



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. 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 

 {Jiirimdifies 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 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 eleventh, and young martins {hirundines iirbicce) 

 were then fledged in their nests. Both species will breed 

 again once. For I see by my Fauna of last year, that young 

 broods come forth so late as September the eighteenth. 

 Are not these late hatchings more in favour of hiding than 

 V^ migration ? Nay, some young martins remained in their 

 ^ . i^^sts last year so late as September the twenty-ninth j 

 v\K /and yet they totally disappeared with us by the fifth of 

 W October. 



S^ 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 ! 

 while the latter stay often till the middle of October \ and 

 once I saw numbers of house-martins on the seventh of 

 November. The martins and red-wing fieldfares were 

 flying in sight together; an uncommon assemblage of 

 summer and winter birds. 



A little yellow bird (it is either a species of the alauda 

 irivialis, or rather perhaps of the motacilla trochilus) still 





