i88 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



are Identical with our musical intervals, are of very 

 great interest, as he is the only person in this country 

 who has made a special study of the subject. There is, 

 he writes, nothing surprising in these phrases v/hen we 

 consider the imitative powers of the best singers, and 

 the frequency of human music in their haunts. The 

 field-labourer whistles; from villages issue louder, 

 though not always sweeter, musical sounds; throughout 

 the year music is heard in country towns. It appears 

 also that our musical scale is of remote origin, and that 

 for thousands of years the intervals which we now 

 employ have been wafted from musical instruments 

 used by men to the ears of listening birds. 



This is far from convincing. Some of our songbirds 

 are imitative in a much higher degree than the black- 

 bird, yet never come near to human music in their songs. 

 The cuckoo with us and numerous other species all the 

 world over, many of them in wild lands where human- 

 made music is never wafted to their ears, do yet observe 

 the same intervals as in our own scale in their calls 

 and songs. My belief is that the blackbird sings in this 

 way naturally, that he approaches nearer to us in his 

 musical scale just as the grasshopper-warbler, the red 

 night-reeler, and the furze-wren go further from us and 

 are like insects in their music, simply because it is his 

 nature to. Blackbirds, we have seen, are distributed 

 pretty well all over the globe and are of many species, 

 ranging in size from those no bigger than a throstle to 

 others large as or larger than jays, but all have beautiful 

 voices which remind English travellers in tropical forests 



