While the ship in which he had embarked was lying under Mount Carmel, about the middle of April, he beheld three extraordinary flights of storks, proceeding from Egypt towards the north-east, each of which took up more than three hours in passing, while it was at the same time upwards of half a mile in breadth![1] During cloudy weather, and when the winds happen, as they frequently do, to blow from different quarters at the same time, waterspouts are often seen upon the coast of Syria, particularly in the neighbourhood of Capes Latikea, Grego, and Carmel. Those which Dr. Shaw had an opportunity of observing seemed, he says, to be so many cylinders of water falling down from the clouds, though by the reflection, as he imagined, of the descending columns, as from the actual dropping of the water contained in them, they sometimes _appeared_, especially at a distance, to be sucked up from the sea. Before we return with our traveller to Barbary, it may be worth the while to notice a remark which he made upon the economy of silk-worms in Syria: there being some danger that, owing to the heat of the climate in the plains, the eggs should be hatched before nature has prepared their proper food, the inhabitants regularly send them, as soon as they are laid, to Conobine, or some other place on Mount Libanus, where their hatching is delayed by the cold until the mulberry buds are ready for them in the spring. In Europe, on the contrary, the mulberry leaves put forth before the eggs of the silk-worm feel the influence of the sun; and at Nice, where many silk-worms are bred, it is the custom, as Dr. Smollet informs us, in order to hasten the process of hatching, to enclose the eggs in small linen bags, which are worn by the women in their bosoms until the worms begin to appear.
Catesby, in his account of Carolina, gives a no less extraordinary description of the flights of pigeons:—“In Virginia I have seen the pigeons of passage fly in such continued trains, three days successively, that there was not the least interval in losing sight of them, but that some where or other in the air they were to be seen continuing their flight south. When they roost (which they do on one another’s backs), they often break down the limbs of oaks by their weight, and leave their dung some inches thick under the trees they roost upon.”—P. 23.