OF 8ELB0ENE. 
3? 
LETTER X. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 
August 4, 1767. 
T has been my misfortime never to have had 
any neighbours whose studies have led them 
towards the pursuit of natural knowledge ; 
so that^ for want of a companion to quicken 
my industry and sharpen my attention, 1 
have made but slender progress in a kind of information to 
which I have been attached from my childhood. 
As to swallows {Hifundines rusticce) being found 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 were, at 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 sufibcated. 
Another intelligent person has informed me that, while 
he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great 
fragment of the chalk-clifi" 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 urhicce) 
Cypselus apus of modern ornithologists. — Ed. 
D 
