APPENDIX. 187 



Organ-Bird. — Contin. 



ling in their small canoes along the shady by-paths, as if struck by the 

 mysterious sound." — Hudson, W. H. : South American Bird-music. (Nature, 

 vol. xxxiii. pp. 199-201.) 



Solitaire. (Musicapa armillata, Viellot.) 



Mr. Hill thought Buffon's " organist " the same as the 

 solitaire. Gosse corrects him on page 202, " Birds of 

 Jamaica." This error admitted, the naturalist of Spanish 

 Town has put us greatly in his debt by a description of a 

 master singer in Hayti : — 



" As soon as the first indications of daylight are perceived, even while 

 the mists hang over the forests, these minstrels are heard pouring forth 

 their wild notes in a concert of many voices, sweet and lengthened like 

 those of the harmonica or musical glasses. It is the sweetest, the most 

 solemn and most unearthly of all the woodland singing I have ever heard. 

 The lofty locality, the cloud-capped heights, to which alone the eagle soars 

 in other countries, — so different from ordinary singing-birds in gardens 

 and cultivated fields, — combine with the solemnity of the music to excite 

 something like devotional associations. The notes are uttered slowly and 

 distinctly, with a strangely-measured exactness. Though it is seldom 

 that the bird is seen, it can scarcely be said to be solitary, since it rarely 

 sings alone, but in harmony or concert with some half-dozen others 

 chanting in the same glen. Occasionally it strikes out into such an 

 adventitious combination of notes as to form a perfect tune. The time 

 of enunciating a single note is that of the semibreve. The quaver is 

 executed with the most perfect trill. It regards the major and minor 

 cadences, and observes the harmony of counterpoint, with all the pre- 

 ciseness of a perfect musician. Its melodies, from the length and dis- 

 tinctness of each note, are more hymns than songs. Though the concert 

 of singers will keep to the same melody for an hour, each little coterie 

 of birds chants a different song, and the traveller by no accident ever 

 hears the same tune." — Hill, R. : in Gosse, P. H., Birds of Jamaica, pp. 

 201-202. 



See Index, Johnston, A. G. 



