22 MIGRATION!?. 



LETTER X. 



TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 



Auyu&t 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 (hirundines rustled) 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 (kirundines 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 (Jiirundmes urbicGe) 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 Linneen 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, (hirundo 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 warblers popping about the deck and 

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

 me." These warblers were the sylvia trochilvs, or hay bird, &c. En. 



