grew upon them. The atmosphere from the beginning of the evening had been remarkably thick and hazy, and the dew, as they felt upon their bridles, was unusually clammy and unctuous. This curious meteor our traveller supposes to be of the same nature with those luminous bodies which skip about the masts and yards of ships at sea, and known among sailors by the name of corpo santo, as they were by that of Castor and Pollux among the ancients.
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
- ↑ Catesbv, 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.
