28 
THE NATURAL HISTORY 
[LETT, 
LETTEK X. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 
It lias been my misfortune never to have had any neighbour 
whose studies have led him 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 whicli I have been attached 
from my childhood. 
As to swallows {Hirwudines rusticce) being fuund 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 
seemed, at their first appearance, dead ; but. on being carried 
toward 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 frag- 
ment 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 eleventh, and young martins {Hirundines urhicm) were then 
hedged in their nests. Both species will breed again once : for 
I see by my fauna of last year, that young broods came forth 
so late as September the eighteenth. Are not these late hatch- 
ings more in favour of hiding than migration ? Nay, some 
young martins remained in their nests last year so late as 
