28 THE NATUEAL HISTORY 



failure of that wild fruit, so conducive to the support of many of 

 the winged nation. For the same severe weather, late in the 

 spring, which cut off all the produce of the more tender and 

 curious trees, destroyed also that of the more hardy and common. 



Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding on 

 the berries of the yew-tree, which answered to the description of 

 the merula torquata or rittg-ousel, were lately seen in this neighbour- 

 hood. I employed some people to procure me a specimen, but 

 without success. See Letter VIII. 



Query — Might not Canary birds be naturalized to this climate, 

 provided their eggs were put, in the spring, into the nests of 

 some of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, &c. ? Be- 

 fore winter perhaps they might be hardened, and able to shift 

 for themselves. 



About ten years ago I used to spend some weeks yearly at 

 Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the 

 Thames, near Hampton-court. In the autumn, I could not help 

 being much amused with those myriads of the swallow kind 

 which assemble in those parts. But what struck me most was, 

 that, from the time they began to congregate, forsaking the 

 chimnies and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds 

 of the aits of that river. Now this resorting towards that 

 element, at that season of the year, seems to give some counten- 

 ance to the northern opinion (strange as it is) of their retiring 

 under water. A Swedish naturalist ^ is so much persuaded of that 

 fact, that he talks, in his calendar of Flora, as familiarly of the 

 swallow's going under water in the beginning of September, as he 

 would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset.^ 



An observing gentleman in London writes me word that he 

 saw an house-martin, on the twenty-third of last October, flying in 

 and out of it's nest in the Borough. And 1 myself, on the twenty- 

 ninth of last October (as I was travelling through Oxford), saw 

 four or five swallows hovering round and settling on the roof of 

 the county-hospital. 



Now is it likely that these poor little birds (which perhaps 

 had not been hatched but a few weeks) should, at that late 

 season of the year, and from so midland a county, attempt a 

 voyage to Goree or Senegal, almost as far as the equator ? ^ 



' [Cakndarium Flora, A. M. Berger, 1756. A thesis published in the Amani- 

 taies AcademiccE, vol. iv. (1759). Translated, with the addition of an English 

 Calendar of Flora, by Stillingfleet [Misc. Tracts, 1755).] 



^ [See Introduction, p. xxxii.] 



8 See Adanson's Voyage to Senegal. [See also Letter XXXIX. to Pennant.] 



