42 
SWALLOWS. 
hour, finding that they were rather rudely handled, 
all of them recovered, so as to fly impatiently round 
the room, in search of some opening, by which they 
might escape. The window was thrown up, and 
they soon found their way into the fields, and were 
never seen again. 
A similar circumstance, though, from the place of 
its discovery, it must refer probably to Sand-Martins, 
was related by a gentleman, who found two Swallows 
in a sank-bank at Newton, near Stirling, quite 
dormant. 
Again at Belleville, in North America, a gentle- 
man observed one evening, a little after sun-set, late 
in the Autumn, a vast number of Swallows collected 
together, high in the air, and hovering over a par- 
ticular spot. Having been informed by one of his 
school-fellows, when a boy, that Swallows had been 
seen to dive into a mill-pond and disappear, he de- 
termined to watch these, and in about ten or fifteen 
minutes, as darkness came on, they lowered their 
flight, and gathered themselves into a smaller circle, 
and at length poured down into a very large hollow 
sycamore tree. It was observed that they came out 
for several successive days, and returned in the 
evening in the same manner. In the following year 
the tree was cut down, the hollow was then found 
to be about six feet in diameter, and filled, six inches 
deep, with bones, feathers, and other remains of dead 
birds, such, probably, as were too old, or too feeble 
to fly out in the Spring. They apparently must have 
occupied the tree for several years. Two other trees 
were subsequently seen, fallen, with similar appear- 
ances *. 
Phil. Mag . vol. l. p. 317. 
