92 
RAPIDITY OF FLIGHT. 
above four or five hours ; but, as the nearest part of 
the country known to produce coffee was some 
hundreds of miles distant, it was calculated that they 
must have flown at the rate of sixty or seventy miles 
per hour. 
But besides this great speed, many, even of those 
apparently least calculated for continued flight, can 
remain on the wing for a much longer time than we 
are apt to imagine, from seeing them slowly and 
heavily waddling, as in the case of farm-yard 
Ducks and Geese, or of a Sparrow, hopping lei- 
surely from bough to bough, or flitting from thence 
to*the house top. Thus the tame domestic Geese, 
belonging to several Cossack villages, near the river 
Don, in Russia, leave their homes in March or April, 
as soon as the ice breaks up, and take flight in a 
body to the more northerly lakes, the nearest of 
which must be five or six hundred miles off, where 
they breed and constantly reside during the summer ; 
but in the beginning of winter, the parent birds 
return with their young ones, each alighting with its 
brood at the door to which it belongs. That flights 
of this sort are not confined to Russia, we may learn 
from the following instance, corroborating the fact 
just mentioned. A gentleman walking near Aber- 
deen, in Scotland, one morning, during a heavy gale 
which blew from the north-west, was attracted by a 
loud cackling overhead; from the awkward motion 
of their wings, he was certain they were not wild 
Ducks, and they seemed to him to be helped on as 
much by the wind as their own exertions. He 
next day heard that the duck-pond of a person in 
the neighbourhood had been deserted the morning 
