my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of
information to which I have been attached from my childhood.

As to swallows (hirundines rusticae) being found in a torpid state
during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this country, I
never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman,
of an inquisitive turn, assures me that, when he was a great boy,
some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church tower
early in the spring, found two or three swifts (hirundines apodes)
among the rubbish, which were, at first appearance, dead, but, on
being carried toward the fire, revived. He told me that, out of his
great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper bag, and hung
them by the kitchen fire, where they were suffocated.

Another intelligent person has informed me that, while he was a
schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of the
chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach; and that
many people found swallows among the rubbish; but, on my
questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my
no small disappointment, he answered me in the negative; but that
others assured him they did.

Young broods of swallows began to appear this year on July the
eleventh, and young martins (hirundines urbicae) were then fledged
in their nests. Both species will breed again once. For I see by my
Fauna of last year, that young broods come forth so late as
September the eighteenth. Are not these late hatchings more in
favour of hiding than migration? Nay, some young martins
remained in their nests last year so late as September the twenty-
ninth; and yet they totally disappeared with us by the fifth of