2'2 MIGRATIONS. 



LETTER X. 



TO THOMAS PENNA1N 7 T, ESQ. 



August 4, 1767. 



IT has been my misfortune never to have had any neigh- 

 bours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of 

 natural knowledge ; so that, for want of a companion 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 (hirundmes 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 (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 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 llth, and young martens (Jiirundines urbicd) were 



* That a few solitary instances of swallows remaining in this country, 

 in a state of torpidity, have occurred, there can be little doubt ; but that 

 they generally hybernate is out of the question. Charles Lucian Bona- 

 parte, in a letter to the Secretary of the Linnten Society, dated from on 

 board the Delaware, near Gibraltar, March 20, 1828, says, " A few 

 days ago, being five hundred miles from the coasts of Portugal, four 

 hundred from those of Africa, we were agreeably surprised by the 

 appearance of a few swallows, (Jiirundo urbica and rustica. ) This, 

 however extraordinary, might have been explained by an easterly gale, 

 which might have cut off the swallows migrating from the main to 

 Madeira, only two hundred miles distant from us ; but what was my 

 surprise in observing several small xvarblers popping about the deck and 

 rigging. These poor little strangers were soon caught and brought to 

 me. " These warblers were the sylvia trochilus, or hay bird, &c. ED. 



