196 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



of them, from the tip of the bill to the toes. 



During the winter I had made the acquaintance of Dr. Brodie and he had 

 promised to take me out with him in the Spring- ; unfortunately I was too busy 

 between April and June to steal much time for Natural History. I was able, 

 however, to make three or four trips in the doctor's company and learn some- 

 thing about the environs of Toronto. About the time of the Spring flights of 

 warblers, we had a day at Victoria Park ; and later he took me over the Don 

 flats to a wooded hill-side beyond the C.P.R. The trip I recall most vividly 

 was my first visit to High Park. It was in June and our way led past the 

 Grenadier Pond, and then west and north. I was greatly struck with the beauty 

 of the scenery, the rolling downs, with their deep ravines, the groves of oak and 

 pine, the underbrush and the richness of the vegetation, interspersed with bar- 

 ren tracts of drifting sand. High Park became a favorite resort of mine and T 

 came in later days to wander all over the district from Parkdale to Humberside 

 and Lambton. 



We had taken insect nets with us, and in a heathy space dotted here and 

 there with oaks I captured several butterflies ; they were nearly all quite strange, 

 and it was then, I think, that there first came home to me the hopelessness of 

 identifying species without good illustrated popular books of entomology ; it 

 was all plain sailing as long as the doctor was with me. but I fully realised how 

 helpless I should be alone- On our way back in the late afternoon, we heard 

 a bird singing in a near-by oak, and stopped to listen. I had rarely heard more 

 delicious music, though obviously of less range and richness than a nightin- 

 gale's ; it was certainly finer than the English thrush, I thought, and wilder 

 like the Missel thrush's, the bars often repeated in true throstle fashion, and 

 with many interludes of those wonderful soft undertones when you knew the 

 bird's throat feathers would be gently ruftiing above the breast ; the doctor 

 thought it was a Hermit thrush ; it was certainly of the thrush family, for I 

 caught a glimpse of it, large, brown, and with speckled breast ; I have since 

 identified the bird from my recollection of the song, as the Brown Thrasher, 

 and its choice of perch confirms this, almost at the top of a large oak, proclaim- 

 ing itself to the world. 



Without either musical ear or knowledge of musical terms, I wish to put 

 it on record that except from the English nightingale I have rarely heard more 

 delightful music than this bird's. It is quite a mistake to suppose that because 

 poets have sung more wonderfully about the English skylark, the thrush and the 

 nightingale, these bird-songs themselves must be far grander than those of On- 

 tario ; the Brown Thrasher and the Rose-breasted Grosbeak are a match any 

 day for their British cousins, and the Hermit Thrush is declared by such mas- 

 ters as John Burroughs and Schuyler Matthews to be more than the peer of the 

 Nightingale ; it isn't the Bird that is wanting, it is the Wordsworth, the Shelley 

 and the Keats ; given the human soul whose chords respond to the birds' in- 

 effable sweetness, their tender melancholy, their world-old pathos and ecstasy 

 of passion, and they too will be among the immortals. 



Another fallacy the faithful observer mu.st expose, in spite of poets' pro- 

 test, is what Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy," — to which we are all peculiarly 

 prone in listening to the songs of birds ; we know, if we reason it out, that 



