SIDE LIGHTS ON BIRDS 



bird with the song of, say, a North American 

 Indian as reproduced by a phonograph, to see the 

 high standard of the bird's performance. Bird 

 music, hke human music, must have been develop- 

 ing for centuries. The first musical efforts of 

 birds undoubtedly consisted of single sounds, 

 like the cheep of the sparrow; and possibly by 

 conscious effort combined with the sheer love of 

 singing, the nightingale, the blackbird and the 

 thrush have become the artists they are now. 

 Why has the sparrow lagged behind ? Who can 

 tell ? Macgillivray, after careful anatomical re- 

 search, said : — ' ' The peculiar song of different 

 species of birds depends on circumstances beyond 

 our cognition." Music and the bird are both 

 mysteries : and in the course of centuries, our 

 cheery chum, the sparrow, may yet develop his 

 phrases. 



Why Birds Sing. 



A writer in a medical journal once advanced a 

 luminous explanation of the reason of the song 

 in birds. He modestly disclaimed the actual 

 discovery and remained content to announce it 

 to the world. 



" Those inveterate anthropomorphists, the 

 poets," he wrote," with Shelley at their head sup- 

 pose birds to sing for sufficiently human reasons. 

 They mostly imagine them to have arrived at 

 the idea of a Creator — an idea really only attained 

 quite late in the course of man's evolution — and 

 they suppose the songs to be mainly expressive 

 of praise and thanksgiving." It would be in- 

 teresting to know what authority exists as to 

 the date when the " idea of a Creator" first 

 dawned on the minds of any of the living things 

 created. So far as we can learn it is an idea of 

 the hoariest antiquity, and we know no evidence 

 whatever, that the idea of a Creator was, in fact, 



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