The-Pall Mall of yesterday contained a most striking and amusing
note on a paper by a Rouen naturalist, M. Pouchet, the director of the Museum of Rouen. This gentleman has dis- covered that the new school of swallows are improving the style of architecture, building their nests with more regard to sanitary principles, so as to contain more room, and admit more light and air. The shape of the nest is, we infer, more nearly that which will include a maximum of inhabitable space, and besides this, and still more important, the entrance to it has been changed from a small round hole into a long slit,—" a sort of balcony," says the Pall Mall, "from which the young swallow may look out upon the world and breathe fresh air." What is more, the new school of swallow architects appear to prefer the new streets, while the old school still build the old nests on the cathedrals and older houses ; perhaps, thinks the writer, from some sense of artistic fitness, which scruples at any change of style in adding extensions to monuments so venerable. If this last fact could be satisfac- torily established, it would furnish a complete answer to the Darwinian theory so far as it dispenses with intellectual motives for animal progress, and would show a curious amount of asithetic culture. No doubt migrating birds are of all others least likely to be the slaves of ocal prejudices. As the travelled cuckoo was the first to conceive the idea of putting her children out to school amongst strangers, so the swallow, no doubt, has learned in the South, where air, and prospect, and apace are best appreciated, to adopt the verandah principle, there so universal. Both bees and birds have now been shown to have made great strides in architectural knowledge.
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