clxxxvi 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
whom heaven has conferred superior powers of wing, must 
sink into torpidity at the bottom of our rivers, or doze all win- 
ter in the caverns of the earth. I am myself something of a 
traveller, and foreign countries afford many novel sights: should 
I assert, that in some of my peregrinations I had met with a 
nation of Indians, all of whom, old and young, at the com- 
mencement of cold weather, descend to the bottom of their 
lakes and rivers, and there remain until the breaking up of 
frost; nay, should I affirm, that thousands of people in the 
neighbourhood of this city, regularly undergo the same semi- 
annual submersion — that I myself had fished up a whole family 
of these from the bottom of the Schuylkill, where they had lain 
t07'pid all winter, carried them home, and brought them all 
comfortably to themselves again; — should I even publish this 
in the learned pages of the Transactions of our Philosophical 
Society,* who would believe me? Is then the organization of a 
swallow less delicate than that of a man? Can a bird, whose vi- 
tal functions are destroyed by a short privation of pure air, and 
its usual food, sustain, for six months, a situation where the 
most robust man would perish in a few hours, or minutes, t 
* Here there is a palpable allusion to a paper on the hybernation of swallows, 
which was pubhshed in the sixth volume of tlie Transactions of the American 
Philosophical Society. This paper was written by one Frederick Antes, and 
was communicated to the Society by the late professor Barton. It is probable 
that Wilson had also read the “letter on the retreat of house-swallows in win- 
ter, from die honourable Samuel Dexter, Esq. to the honourable James Bow- 
doin. Esq. and that “ from the Reverend Mi’. Packard to the honourable 
Samuel Dextei’, Esq.,” both of them published in the ^Memoii’s of the Ameri- 
can Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston, vols. 1 and 2. 
Such communications are not calculated to do honour to any learned institu- 
tion; and they ought to be rejected with scorn and reprehension. 
t Carlisle, in his lecture on muscular motion, observes, tiiat, “ animals of 
the class Mammalia, wliich hybernate and become torpid in the winter, have at 
all times a power of subsisting- under a confined resphation, which would de- 
stroy other animals not having tins peculiar habit. In all the hybernating 
Mammalia there is a peculiar stmcture of the heart and its principal veins. ” 
Pliilosophical Transactions for 1805, p. 17. 
“ If all birds, except swallows,” says Reeve, “ are able to survive the win- 
