364 SWALLOWS Class II. 



in laying hold of a straw with their bills, and so 

 plunge down in society; that others again would 

 form a large mass, by clinging together with 

 their feet, and so commit themselves to the 

 deep.* 



Such are the relations given by those who are 

 fond of this opinion, and which, though delivered 

 without exaggeration, must provoke a smile. 

 They assign not the smallest reason to account 

 for these birds being able to endure so long a 

 submersion without being suffocated, or without 

 decaying, in an element so unnatural to their 

 delicate frame ; when we know that the otter,')' 

 the corvorant, and the grebes, soon perish, if 

 caught under ice, or entangled in nets : and it 



* Klein hist. av. 205, 206. Mkmarck migr. av. Amcen. 

 acad. iv. 089. 



f Though entirely satisfied in our own mind of the impos- 

 sibility of these relations; yet, desirous of strengthening our 

 opinion with some better authority, we applied to that able 

 anatomist, Mr. John Hunter ; who was so obliging to inform 

 us, that he had dissected many swallows, but found nothing in 

 them different from other birds as to the organs of respiration. 

 That all those animals which he had dissected of the class that 

 sleep during winter, such as lizards, frogs, &c. had a very dif- 

 ferent conformation as to those organs. That all these animals, 

 he believes, do breathe in their torpid state; and, as far as his ex- 

 perience reaches, he knows they do : and that therefore he 

 esteems it a very wild opinion, that terrestrial animate can re- 

 main any long time under water without drowning. 



