Even Gilbert White,[[45]] was inclined to think hibernation might be true, at least of British swallows; and Cowper sings—
The swallows in their torpid state
Compose their useless wings.
Alexander Wilson[[46]] thought it necessary to combat vigorously the same fiction then persistent among Pennsylvania farmers, and did so at length in his American Ornithology published in 1808.
But the wildest hypothesis was the one prevalent in the Middle Ages and alluded to by Dryden in his poem The Hind and The Panther, speaking of young swallows in autumn:
They try their fluttering wings and trust themselves in air,
But whether upward to the moon they go,
Or dream the winter out in caves below,
Or hawk for flies elsewhere, concerns us not to know.
Southwards, you may be sure, they bent their flight,