132 SPRING. 



may be so. There was a time when the saying of 

 Linneeus was a sort of ille dixit in natural history, 

 which it would have been the greatest of all heresies to 

 deny ; and yet he not only believed that the swallows 

 plunge to the bottom of the water to preserve them- 

 selves from the rigour of the winter air, in spite of their 

 levity, as compared with the fluid in which they thus 

 take up their abode ; that they remain thus, contrary 

 to the whole economy and practice of warm blooded 

 animals, for between eight and nine months of the year, 

 without once inhaling that atmosphere, the want of 

 which would be almost instantly fatal to them during 

 the other three ; and that their feathers are not only 

 preserved, but must actually be revived by a moult, 

 while the birds are under the water " caked in the mud," 

 as the authorities have it, and yet not a single feather 

 of the cast ones should be found floating on the sur- 

 face. This was believed by the great naturalist, by the 

 Honourable Daines Barrington, who tried the songs of 

 English birds by the gamut, and would have noted 

 them all in sol, fa, if the intervals had been even the 

 tithe of a semitone. Persons of great probity, too, 

 made asseverations and affidavits to the facts, and the 

 friends of the laborious and accurate Reaumur pro- 

 mised that they would send him the identical birds 

 that had taken their nine months' bath under the ice, 

 but somehow or other not one of them ever kept their 

 word with him ; and when they were pressed, it turned 

 out that, like the beholders of ghosts, they had not 

 actually seen them themselves, but had been assured 

 of the fact by other eye witnesses, who were every way 

 as worthy of credit. Even the Scottish parson (see 



