Ixx 
INTRODUCTIONT. 
\^'hich he credited as philosophical and true. But he did not qonfine his 
relations within the common bounds of improbability ; he laughs at reason, 
and bids defiance to common sense ; and relates the most disgustful and 
monstrous fabrications with all the simplicity of truth. He, who could 
gravely speak of the fall of Mice from the sky, and describe a floating 
island of animated matter, a mile in diameter, as a well-known animal on 
the coast of Norway, was fit to be the historian of the annual torpidity of 
Swallows beneath an element, which is a gulph of destruction to those 
beings, unprovided by nature with the necessary organs to remain in it. Not 
only the Swallow, the Martin, the Swift, the Goatsucker, and the Cuckoo, are 
migrants ; various species of short-winged summer birds, perform an 
annual journey from one country to another. Ill fitted for such extensive 
flights as the Swallow tribes, they contentedly seek for subsistence within 
a narrower sphere. Their journies are bounded by a few degrees, which 
they rarely exceed, as they find in the neighbouring Southern states, all that 
What naturalist ever discovered the Nightingale, the Redstart, the Flycatcher, the Black- 
cap, in our hedges in the winter season, or in a state of torpid inaction ? Whoever met with 
flocks of Fieldfares, or Redwings, in this country, in the summer season, or found them sub- 
mersed ? Their powers of wing are far inferior to that of the Swallow : they are as regular in their 
appearance, and no one denies their migration. The Norwegians in general foster the belief of 
the submersion of Swallows. I have conversed with a great number of natives of that country, 
who uniformly gave credence to this doctrine. Some of them fancied, that they had themselves 
known proofs of the fact; but on close consideration, they all, except one, admitted, that their 
belief was founded on the relations of others, who drew their belief from a similar source ; and 
the one who seemed to have ocular demonstration, mentioned, that when he was a child, he was 
present, in the winter season, at the felling of an hollow oak which lay in a stream near Dron- 
theim, from which were taken two of the Swallow genus, but of what species he could not deter- 
mine, nor whether the part in which they lay concealed was submersed. If they seek more 
southern climes than Europe can afford them, they need not traverse vast distances over the sea. 
Mr. White, in his History of Selborne, vol. i. p. 235, asserts, that his brother had frequent 
opportunities of attending, in spring and fall, to the migrations of birds. He speaks of myriads 
of Swallows as seen passing the Straits of Gibraltar, and particularly notices that many of our 
soft-billed summer birds of passage were among them. 
