44 
NATURE NOTES. 
an ostrich, unless indeed the creature conspicuously hid its head 
in the sand. He does not care whether swallows hibernate or 
not. White seems to have believed that they did, and perhaps 
they do ; all sorts of things may happen. These are questions 
into which a sensitive mind thinks it almost indelicate to 
inquire. Swallows, according to Theophile Gautier, sit about 
on railings in autumn, afterwards they go to Athens, Smyrna, 
the First Cataract, and elsewhere. White himself did not think 
that those “ poor little birds,” young swallows, go to Goree or 
Senegal ; it seems too much to expect, though Henri Murger, 
on the other hand, declares that they fly a thousand miles at a 
stretch. “ Some do stay behind and bide with us during the 
winter,” says White. He mentions a clergyman who found 
some torpid swifts (which are very much the same kind of bird) 
in a church tower in winter. With genuine but mistaken kind- 
ness he hung them up in a basket near the kitchen fire, and 
they never recovered. Sometimes they stay late, and some- 
times they go away earljy and to chronicle all this was a matter 
of interest to White and to many other persons. 
As to cuckoos. White did not know why they do not hatch 
their own eggs. Recent observers, however, record instances of 
maternal devotion in the cuckoo. The question arises, has the 
great emotional wave of sentiment reached cuckoos, and are 
they beginning to be converted characters, or are we to suppose 
that the}f originally hatched out on their own account, and that 
a few still revert to the ancestral habit ? The American cuckoo 
does hatch her own eggs, but that ma}'^ be owing to the influ- 
ence of the Pilgrim Fathers, and to the superior morality of the 
American continent. White, of course, was not a Darwinian, 
but a Darwinian would easily account for the peculiar morals of 
the cuckoo (which are execrable), and for its want of maternal 
instinct. Not to be hatched by their mothers, on some acci- 
dental occasions, agreed with the young cuckoos ; they sur- 
A’ived better than other cuckoos, but acquired loose habits. 
Hence they gradually left off hatching their own eggs. This 
theory might not have seemed satisfactory to White, but it 
is at all events evolutionary, as far as it goes. Concern- 
ing cats — a creature more easil}'^ observed than a small bird — 
White remarks that they are “ violently fond of fish,” yet in- 
expert as anglers. Some cats, however, have been fishers, in 
spite of their native dislike of water, which in itself accounts for 
their love of a fish diet. They like it because they cannot 
usually get it b}^ their own exertions. Mr. Buckland, however, 
mentions a cat called Puddles, Avho used to dive out of a boat 
and catch dogfish. Mr. Buckland thinks a cat on the roof 
might catch a young swallow. Probably it could do more. 
A cat at Whitchurch, in Hants, used to lie above a SAvallow’s 
nest, and take the birds at the wicket, as it were, Avhen they 
flew out. It never injured them, and seemed to act thus purely 
as a matter of sport. This is not more extraordinary than the 
