3 OCTOBER 1931, Page 3

The Swallows When Noah saved a pair of swallows on

board the Ark he was, we are told, acting under orders and had the definite purpose of preserving the species. In saving some thousands of these and other birds out of the millions that exist to-day the Viennese and Venetians who have transported them had no motive whatever except kindness to animals. In Vienna the swallow has been loved, at any rate, since the days of Strauss's Dorf-Schwalben aus Oesterreich, but in Italy it has been the object of massacre. If this gratuitous aid to the belated, storm-bound or feeble flyers js not treated merely as amusing or sentimental, we believe that it may awaken in the really warm-hearted Italians a quite new feeling towards the animal world.