ABSTRACT
The puzzle of what happened to the 'hirundines' in the course of each autumn was no puzzle at all, for many of White's contemporaries. Dr Johnson could assure his listeners that 'Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lye in the bed of a river.'1 Johnson was hardly a naturalist, but the same view seems to have been accepted by Linnaeus, and was certainly expressed by various of his students. As Gilbert White remarks, one Swedish author speaks as confidently of the swallows' retiring under water in September as he would of his domestic hens' retiring to the hen-house at sunset.2
