Booth : Migration of the Common Swallow. 89 
the last fifteen years, showing that the average date for arrival 
is the 10th February, and for departure the 13th October/ 
The late Howard Saunders, in his valuable * Manual of British 
Birds ’ (1899, p. 164), says ' ' To the extreme south of 
Europe the Swallow returns by the end of January, and below 
Seville I found many nestlings by April 16th/ W. H. F., 
writing in The Field of October 28th, 1916, in ‘ Notes from 
Salonika/ says : — ‘ I saw a single Swallow on February 27th, 
and two days later, in the early morning, found every building 
in a small village covered with Swallows. They were nearly 
all asleep, and had, no doubt, just arrived/ 
I now give some extracts from a paper by the late Dr. 
Otto Herman, whom I had the pleasure of hearing at the 
Fourth International Ornithological Congress, held in London 
in June, 1905, on the work done at the Hungarian Central 
Office of Ornithology, at Buda Pesth. He said* : — ‘ In 1898 
more than 5,900 masters of elementary schools, and other 
men also, decided to observe the arrival of the Chimney 
Swallow, and to report their observations to the Hungarian 
Central Office. These observers covered the area of Hungary 
very well. They sent in their data on special post-cards ; 
the points of observation were geographically determined 
and then schematized, on particular maps, each day separately. 
In such a way we obtained 54 day maps, each with as many 
dots as there were points of observation. The result was : — 
Beginning of the migration, March 10th, 3 points ; culmination, 
March 30th, 343 points; end, May 2nd, 15 points. Hereby 
the arrivals are seen to increase until March 30th, when they 
culminate, and then they decrease. We see, furthermore, 
that the arrivals fluctuated according to the state of the 
weather, that the settling of the Alpine region began only at 
the middle of April, that the plain, the hilly portion (Trans- 
danubian district) and the Transylvanian plateau differ with 
respect to the time of migration, and that, therefore, Hungary 
may be divided into four migration areas. Furthermore, 
it was remarked that the settling did not take place on narrow 
routes of migration, also not on a broad front, but that it 
resembled the scattering of the seed by the sower, where many 
a seed might be flung this side of, and beyond the place for 
which it was intended. It was, moreover, proved that the 
mean day of arrival in Hungary, for the year 1898, was April 
8th— since rectified to April 7th, on the basis of more than 
10,000 data. From these series followed the settling maps, 
which show that the Swallow settles in Hungary in spring, 
coming from the south ; the White Stork from south-east to 
* Proceedings of the Fourth International Ornithological Congress, 
London, 1905, pp. 168 and 173. 
1922 Mar. 1 
