Andrew J. Lewis

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Andrew J. Lewis | A Democracy of Facts, An Empire of Reason: Swallow Submersion and Natural History in the Early American Republic | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

A Democracy of Facts, An Empire of Reason: Swallow Submersion and Natural History in the Early American Republic

THE first issue of Boston's Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1785) contains a letter from Samuel Dexter, a judge from Dedham, Massachusetts, to James Bowdoin, president of the academy. Dexter wrote that his friend, Judge Foster of Brookfield, Massachusetts, had witnessed "a multitude of swallows, endeavoring to disengage themselves from the mud" of a drained pond in the spring. Aware that bird migration "has been a problem among naturalists," Dexter wished to add his observations to the debate of "whether certain species of birds migrate in autumn to distant countries, and return in the spring, or remain with us during the winter, in a torpid state." Dexter agreed with the latter opinion, at least with regard to the "house-swallow," and offered "other facts" that he believed "render it probable" that swallows "sink into ponds and rivers, in the fall of the year, and lie there, benumbed and motionless, until the return of spring."¹	1
Dexter marshaled evidence to support this opinion. A former neighbor told him when warm weather returned that "'it is almost time for the swallows to come out of the mud, where they have lain all winter.'" Dexter related how he called his neighbor's explanation into question, yet the man recounted that every fall swallows would congregate on the reeds near the edge of the river. It seemed to the neighbor that their "torpitude had already begun," since the swallows were nearly motionless. The weight of the birds bent the grass to the water and, though the neighbor had never seen them sink, he "doubted not of their immersion any more than if he had been a witness of it." The swallows' complete disappearance and their spring struggle from the mud further convinced the neighbor. He instructed Dexter to "look out for their resurrection."²	2
"Although I paid little regard to it for some years," Dexter wrote Bowdoin, "I followed his advice at length, and watched for their appearance several seasons, as carefully as I could." He confessed that he never saw firsthand the swallows rising out of the muck. Yet, "in more years than one" and "at the proper time in the spring," Dexter witnessed large flocks at river's edge unable to use their wings and covered with viscous ooze. Noting that they could fly just a few yards and "seeming to want to rest themselves, as if feeble, or fatigued," Dexter believed them recently emerged from the mud and not recovered from their winter stupor. Circumstantial evidence was enough to persuade. Dexter admitted that, though he "may possibly overrate these discoveries," he agreed with previous informants, concluding that swallows spent the winters submerged in the subaqueous mud of ponds, lakes, and rivers.³	3
Clearly, Dexter was not alone in this opinion of the winter destination of swallows. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, swallow submersion—the belief that come autumn, swallows hibernate in the mud of lakes and rivers rather than migrate—was one of the most actively discussed and frequently recurring natural history subjects in American print. Its advocates and detractors filled the pages of leading scientific journals, natural history books, literary magazines, and newspapers with accounts of the phenomenon and experiments, as well as with theories about both. Swallow submersion was the subject of public and academic lectures on natural history, occupying meetings of America's scientific societies and becoming a currency of exchange among a growing collection of natural history enthusiasts, a self-identified group of men and women interested in the natural world who believed themselves to be capable of unbiased, commonsense observation and immune to prejudice.	. . .

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