THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF BIRDS. 615 



which give it, when fresh, a very pretty appearance. Besides these, 

 there were several newly-picked leaves and young shoots of a pinkish 

 color, the whole showing a decided taste for the beautiful.' Well may 

 Mr. Gould say, ' These highly-decorated halls of assembly must be 

 regarded as the most wonderful instances of bird-architecture yet dis- 

 covered;' and the taste, we see, of the several species certainly dif- 

 fers." You could not have distincter evidence in a lady's salon care- 

 fully decorated with flowers, either of her taste for the beautiful, or 

 of the deliberate subordination of that taste to social purposes, than 

 we have here of the same qualities in birds. Mr. Leith Adams in his 

 paper hardly refers, as we have already observed, to this remarkable 

 class of facts at all, only pointing out that the obvious preference for 

 gayly-colored plumage on the part of the females clearly implies a 

 genuine taste for the beautiful in birds, which is, of course, true, but 

 is not nearly as good evidence of a distinct intellectual development 

 on this point as the elaborate decoration of their bowers by birds for 

 festive purposes. The mere preference of gay colors may be uncon- 

 scious and purely instinctive, but when a bird looks out for bleached 

 land-shells and tall grasses to ornament its reception-room, and fetches 

 round stones to "fix" the gi-asses in their proper place, and then uses 

 the hall thus provided only for festive social purposes, you can hardly 

 deny such birds either the powers or the tastes of landscape-gardeners 

 and ball-givers. And we fancy this kind of deliberate taste for the 

 beautiful, and the beautiful in subordination to social purposes, is con- 

 fined among the lower animals to birds ; and, as regards the social 

 purposes, to a very few orders of birds. A great many birds seem to 

 have more appreciation of beauty of color than almost any other class 

 of animals, but only in a few species has it risen to the point of a 

 really decorative social art. "We may gather from this that in the bird 

 the perception of harmony is of a very high kind, and this evidently 

 applies to sound as well as color. No creatures utter sounds so full of 

 beauty, or display such wonderful qualifications for imitating the 

 beautiful sounds they hear. Must we not say, then, that the bird has, 

 in more force than any other species of the lower animals, the percep- 

 tion of harmony in forms, colors, and sounds, and the further con- 

 sciousness of the fascination such harmony has for its own species, 

 and the enhancement it lends to social enjoyments ? 



Another great mental quality which birds seem to have in excess 

 of other animals is a very fine calculation of distance, and this, too, in 

 direct subordination to their own well-being. It has been shown again 

 and again and Mr. Leith Adams refers to some facts in support of it 

 in this essay that, as new weapons of offence are invented, many 

 species of birds narrowly observe the range of the new r bows or guns, 

 and keep out of range, not even troubling themselves to go at all 

 farther than is necessary to be out of range. Quite recently we have 

 read, though we cannot verify the reference at present, of some birds 



