THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF BIRDS. 617 



On the whole, however, it may be safely said that birds seem to 

 have much more capacity for perceiving beauty, much more gift for 

 social enjoyment, a finer knowledge of distance and direction, and 

 more power of vocal imitation, than any other order of animals of 

 which we know any thing. On the other hand, they have less sevse 

 of power and sympathy than the dog, and therefore much less sense 

 of responsibility to their superiors, whom they often love, but seldom 

 serve. Perhaps we might generalize these mental qualifications by 

 saying that birds are chiefly educated by perceptions, wonderfully 

 accurate indeed, but still of things at a distance, of things at an almost 

 telescopic range ; that their rapidity of flight makes them creatures of 

 wide experience, but not of full experience of any species but their 

 own ; and that, as a result, they cannot know men well enough to learn 

 as much from men, as dogs, and cats, and elephants, and even other 

 orders of creatures learn. Birds, in short, get bird's-eye views of the 

 earth, and bird's-eye views, however instructive to those who have 

 previously mastered the details carefully, do not exactly furnish a 

 good basis for progressive knowledge. They obviously get a knowl- 

 edge of geography, and, in some sense, of the air and its currents, such 

 as no other creatures can have. They have an ear for music, and an 

 eye for harmony of form and color, and probably of movement for 

 there are bird-dances which Taglioni would have despaired of imi- 

 tating such as no other member of the animal world possesses ; and 

 the perception of beauty, we know, depends on nothing so much as 

 the coup cVceil, and this birds can always command. But they lose, 

 by their great privilege of wings, that slow and sure experience of the 

 ways of man which some less-gifted animals acquire. A swift which 

 flies at the rate of 270 miles an hour, according to Mr. Leith Adams, 

 clearly cannot have a brain to utilize an experience acquired at that 

 rate in any but a very perfunctory way. Therefore, though birds 

 have so strange a perception of beauty, which hardly needs close 

 analysis, they are too fast, too migratory in their habits, to learn any 

 thing which needs perfect fidelity and vigilance confined to a very 

 narrow circle of facts. They are the musicians, and we might almost 

 say the sensuous poets of the animal world ; but musicians and sensu- 

 ous poets do not conduce to progressive knowledge and ethical cult- 

 ure. Birds range too high and fly too fast for sympathy with man, 

 and so it happens that their intellectual powers, remarkable and unique 

 as they are in the animal world, never become so human and so almost 

 spiritual as those of creatures which can only boast of very inferior 

 powers. Spectator. 



