144 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
quent victim to the herd-boy's gun. He is a pretty bird, very easily 
domesticated, but void of genius. He does not care to congregate, is not 
clamorous, and never goes far inland — perhaps not above a mile; but he 
shifts his roosting quarters frequently from one cave or rock to another, 
probably just because the wind shifts. 
" On the 19th of July last, I observed a migration of several hundreds 
of the common swift. I knew that these birds, breeding only once in the 
season, were the first of the swallow tribe to leave our shores, but I had 
no idea that they left us so early. I have not had any opportunity of 
watching their habits for nearly twenty years, as they do not frequent 
this peninsula ; indeed these are the first I have seen here during a resi- 
dence of nearly nineteen years. Perhaps i may mention the particulars 
of this flitting in as few words as possible. l.s^, The weather was very 
w^arm and still, with a few fleecy clouds overhead. The hour was be- 
tween five and six in the afternoon. 2d, The direction from which they 
came was N.E., as 1 thought — probably from Ayrshire. They passed 
over me as I stood on the shore, at a spot about five miles north of Port- 
patrick, and, holding on their way, I judged, that they would reach the 
Irish coast some^vhere about Portaferry. 3c?, Their flight was direct, and 
steady, and quiet — no wheeling nor screaming, such as they practise when 
feeding or sporting round some old gray tower. They seemed to have 
important business on hand, and went about it in a businesslike way. 
The level of their course was not high. They swept over the cliffs, which 
are not above 150 feet high, and seemed to retain the same level, as far 
as I could see them crossing the Channel. I should guess the height at 
about 260 feet, or even less. 4f/i, The order of flight. — They travelled 
in a wide column. The individual birds were many yards asunder; some 
were 100 yards to one side, some as many to the other side of me, and in 
this fashion I observed them for fully twenty minutes ; sometimes there 
were twenty in sight directly overhead, then half-a-dozen, then for a 
second or two there v/ere none, and then another scattered detachment. 
In this order the stream flowed on, till at length it ceased. It is difficult 
to conjecture how many there may have been in all ; at the time I guessed 
them at nearly a thousand. 1 never had an opportunity of witnessing 
the migrations of any of our smaller birds, except occasionally flights of 
linnets in beating up to windward before a gale ; and I thought that to 
escape hawks they invariably moved under cover of night. Larger birds, 
such as ducks, geese, swans, I have frequently seen on the move in day- 
light ; while the swallows which congregate on our house-tops in September 
are found some morning to have made a night- flitting, and usually a 
moonlight one. 
" There is another fact I may mention to you: On Friday, the 9th Sep- 
tember, we had," he continues, " our first equinoctial gale. It lasted for 
about a week. On the lOth I picked up (at the place where I had seen 
the swifts in July) a ' stormy petrel, the Procellaria pelagica of the 
Atlantic. These birds were frequently seen off our shores in former 
times ; but now they seem to keep outside of the Mull of Cantyre. 
Whether an increase of steam navigation has driven them from the 
Firth of Clyde to the open ocean, I cannot say. The same gale cast 
ashore a vast number of medusse. So numerous were they that each tide 
left a belt of them, at high-w^ater raa,rk, of ten or twelve feet wide, all 
along the beach. There seemed to be only one species, of a pinkish 
shade, ^\ith four dull white eyes, and varied from two to four inches in 
diameter. They were not so fleshy as some species I have seen. Those 
waslied up by one tide were found to be quite dry, and left little but a 
membrane when the next tide came in. The most remarkable result of 
the gale, was the destruction of many thousands of the short-winged 
