RAPIDITY OF FLIGHT. 93 



above four or five hours; but, as the nearest part of 

 the country known to produce coffee was some 

 hundreds of miles distant, it was calculated that they 

 must have flown at the rate of sixty or seventy miles 

 per hour. 



But besides this great speed, many, even of those 

 apparently least calculated for continued flight, can 

 remain on the wing for a much longer time than we 

 are apt to imagine, from seeing them slowly and 

 heavily waddling, as in the case of farm-yard 

 Ducks and Geese, or of a Sparrow, hopping lei- 

 surely from bough to bough, or flitting from thence 

 to the house top. Thus the tame domestic Geese, 

 belonging to several Cossack villages, near the river 

 Don, in Kussia, leave their homes in March or April, 

 as soon as the ice breaks up, and take flight in a 

 body to the more northerly lakes, the nearest of 

 which must be five or six hundred miles off, where 

 they breed and constantly reside during the summer; 

 but in the beginning of winter, the parent birds 

 return with their young ones, each alighting with its 

 brood at the door to which it belongs. That flights 

 of this sort are not confined to Russia, we may learn 

 from the following instance, corroborating the fact 

 just mentioned. A gentleman walking near Aber- 

 deen, in Scotland, one morning, during a heavy gale 

 which blew from the north-west, was attracted by a 

 loud cackling overhead; from the awkward motion 

 of their wings, he was certain they were not wild 

 Ducks, and they seemed to him to be helped on as 

 much by the wind as their own exertions. He 

 next day heard that the duck-pond of a person in 

 the neighbourhood had been deserted the morning 



