THE MUSIC OF BIRD- SONG 231 



has often been attempted, especially in popular 

 journals, by contributors who seemed to imagine that 

 when they had taken down one or two phrases of 

 one, or perhaps of two, individuals, they had obtained 

 a full transcript of the song of a species. I trust 

 that the variety of the music which I have written 

 down (though but fragmentary) may suggest the 

 falsity of such limitations. 



Although possessed of a musical ear, which from 

 childhood had been exercised in various musical 

 pursuits, I was at first greatly puzzled in attempts 

 to follow the intricacies of bird -music, which are 

 often executed so rapidly as to be not only diffi- 

 cult to follow, but sometimes actually impossible 

 to record in their natural order. My method of 

 noting the music of birds was as follows : I 

 did not attempt to write all the music of a rapid 

 singer, but listened for some phrase sufficiently 

 simple for my purpose, and then carefully wrote 

 it down. By this method, slow though it was, 

 I was enabled to obtain records which, although 

 not perhaps scientifically accurate, were as true as 

 musical notation would allow. Many of the phrases 

 of both the thrush and blackbird came wonderfully 

 near, indeed, many seemed identical with, the in- 

 tervals of our scale. Such an incident does not 



