40 
HIRUNDO AMERICANA. 
of spring ! Is not this true, ye wise men of Europe 
and America, who have published so many credible 
narratives on this subject ? The geese, the ducks, the 
cat-bird, and even the wren, which creeps about our 
outhouses in summer like a mouse, are all acknowledged 
to be migratory, and to pass to southern regions at the 
approach of winter : the swallow alone, on whom 
Heaven has conferred superior powers of wing, must 
sink in torpidity at the bottom of our rivers, or doze 
all winter in the caverns of the earth. 1 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 commencement 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 Schuylkill, 
where they had lain torpid 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 vital 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 ? Away with such absur- 
dities ! they are unworthy of a serious refutation. 
I should be pleased to meet with a man who has been 
personally more conversant with birds than myself, 
who has followed them in their wide and devious 
routes — studied their various manners — mingled with 
and marked their peculiarities more than I have done ; 
yet the miracle of a resuscitated swallow, in the depth 
of winter, from the bottom of a mill-pond, is, I confess, 
a phenomenon in ornithology that I have never met 
with. 
