Notes and Comments. 
179 
SWALLOWS. 
Our attention is drawn to a paper by H. J. Massingham in 
No. 47 of To-day. The author states ‘ Naturalists have known 
for some years that the Swallow is dying out of Western 
Europe, and that in a decade or so, if the drainage continues 
and international action does not secure a reprieve, this bird, 
a gay streamer at the mast-head of the new year coming up 
over the horizon, will never more fly that glad signal. 
Swallows travel north word in spring from North, Central and 
South Africa and Arabia in rushes lasting over several weeks, 
and the northern shores of the Mediterranean are convenient 
inns for them, whose innkeepers murder their guests year after 
year with ever more effective inventions for a wholesale 
despatch. It is not true that Hirundo rustica is slipping its 
hold on life from natural causes. Extinction is rarely if ever 
a guillotine motion in nature, and a species, whether through 
over -specialisation— an incapacity, that is to say, to adapt 
itself to new conditions — a failure to progress, or other causes, 
leaves the world, as no doubt the great saurians left it, by 
imperceptible steps, parting from it like a lover from his own 
(albeit unconsciously) with reluctant feet, backward glances 
and stayings. Swallows are on tiptoe with life ; there is no 
trailing down the airless valleys of stagnation and decay with 
them ; and their responses to the stress of climatic conditions 
in the arrivals and departures of spring and autumn show a 
plastic enterprise and weather-wisdom supplementary to the 
original germinal impulse of migration. Swallows are in the 
full blush and quiver of vitality.’ A correspondent assures 
us that in the south of France three million swallows were 
killed for millinery and food in one year ! 
FLASHLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY AND NATURE. 
The Lancashire and Cheshire Entomological Society 
recently met to hear a lecture by Mr. Oswald J. Wilkinson 
upon the above subject. Mr. Wilkinson has made a special 
study of photography at night by means of flashlight, and 
last year his series of lantern slides of insect life gained the 
medal of the Royal Photographic Society. In his address, he 
shewed how the student could obtain good results at night by 
means of flashlight, and, at the same time, gather records of 
the nocturnal habits of insects and other creatures. The 
speed of the exposure — about 1 -5000th of a second — makes 
the operator almost independent of the movements of the 
subject. The slides showing the change of the caterpillar of 
the Painted Lady butterfly proved that during the process of 
getting rid of its old skin, the caterpillar is in a state of rapid 
oscillation, but the photographs were as definite as if the insect 
had been at rest ; the succession of pictures showed the differ - 
1922 June 1 
