eresting, power of the bird.[11]

[10] I wrote this some time ago, and the endeavors I have since
made to verify statements on points of natural history which I
had taken on trust have given me reason to doubt everybody's
accuracy. The ordinary flight of the swallow does not, assuredly,
even in the dashes, reach anything like this speed.

[11] Incidentally suggestive sentences occur in the history of
Selborne, but its author never comes to the point, in this case.

Taking Michelet's estimate--eighty French leagues, roughly two hundred
and fifty miles, an hour--we have a thousand miles in four hours. That
is to say, leaving Devonshire after an early breakfast, he could be in
Africa to lunch.

49. He could, I say, if his flight were constant; but though there is
much inconsistency in the accounts, the sum of testimony seems definite
that the swallow is among the most fatiguable of birds. "When the
weather is hazy," (I quote Yarrell) "they will alight on fishing-boats
a league or two from land, so tired that when any one tries to catch
them, they can scarcely fly from one end of the boat to the other."

I have no time to read to you the interesting evidence on this point
given by Yarrell, but only that of the brother of White of Selborne, at
Gibraltar. "My brother has always found," he himself writes, "that some
of his birds, and particularly the swallow kind, are very sparing of
their pains in crossing the Mediterranean; for when arrived at
Gibraltar, they do not 'set forth their airy caravan, high over seas,'
but scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six or seven in
a company; and sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and
water, direct their course to the opposite continent at the narrowest
passage they can find."

50. You will observe, however, that it remains an open question whether
this fear of sea may not be, in the swallow, like ours of the desert.
The commissariat department is a serious one for birds that eat a
thousand flies a day when just out of the egg; and it is possible that
the weariness of swallows at sea may depend much more on fasting than
flying. Captain (or Admiral?) Sir Charles Wager says that "one
spring-time, as he came into soundings in the English Channel, a great
flock of swallows came and settled on all his rigging; every rope was
covered; they hung on one another like a swarm of bees; even the decks
were filled with them.