THE LANGUAGE OF BIRDS. 
155 
narratives on this subject ? The geese, the ducks, 
the cat-bird, and even the wren, which creeps about 
our out-houses in summer, like a mouse, are all 
acknowledged to be migratory, and to pass to south- 
ern regions at the approach of winter. The swal- 
low alone, on whom Heaven has conferred superior 
powers of wing, must sink in torpidity at the bottom 
of our rivers, or doze all the winter in the caverns of 
the earth. I am myself something of a traveller, and 
foreign countries afford many novel sights. Should 
I assert that, in some of my peregrinations, I had 
met with a nation of Indians, all of whom, old and 
young, at the commencement of cold weather, de- 
scend to the bottom of their lakes and rivers, and 
there remain until the breaking up of frost ; nay, 
should I affirm, that thousands of people in the neigh- 
bourhood of this city regularly undergo the same 
semi-annual submersion, — that I myself had fished 
up a whole family of these from the bottom of 
Schuylkill, where they had lain torpid all winter, 
carried them home, and brought them all comfort- 
ably to themselves again — should I even publish 
this in the learned pages of the Transactions of our 
Philosophical Society, who would believe me ? Is, 
then, the organization of a swallow less delicate than 
