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By such means only shall we discover the degrees of 
mental elaboration which guide their actions, and—an infinite- 
ly more valuable fact—man’s true position in regard to them. 
I venture to suggest that the Club should annually devote one 
or two pages of its transactions to a record of aberrant habit in 
animals. There is always passing from our memories a rich 
harvest of such experiences, from which none glean. 
Twenty years ago, I was familiar with the habitual songs 
and cries of the commoner birds, such as finches, crows, thrush 
and blackbird, wren and hedge-sparrow, &c. In the year ’81 
I listened, on 18 almost successive nights, to a nightingale 
which sang about two miles from Stroud, and I clearly detected 
in its song certain notes which were closely like those of other 
wild species of my acquaintance. Before this time I had been 
‘quite familiar with the imitativeness of several kinds of caged 
birds, and especially that of the thrush and blackbird, both of 
which I had trained. 
In the spring of 1885 I was helping to nurse a sick 
relation, and all day long a thrush sang in the top of an acacia 
tree in the garden. I had abundant opportunities of watching 
this bird, and of timing its periods of song, which, in one day, 
amounted to the enormous extent of sixteen hours. The bird 
watched for food from its perch; it generally flew at once to 
the spot where it fed, and often began to sing when only half- 
way back again. This thrush imitated freely notes of the 
partridge, brown wren, linnet, greenfinch, house-sparrow, and 
chicken. Guided by this experience, I listened for and readily 
detected a great number of imitations, by various birds, of 
cries which I knew very well; and in the autumn of 1887 I 
began to record what I heard, by writing down the names of 
the singers, and the notes which they reproduced. This I did 
at every opportunity, from dawn to midnight, and by giving up 
usual summer amusements I made such opportunities occur, 
outside of office hours, almost daily. After working in this 
way for eighteen months, I began, for the first time, to make 
comparisons between my records; and they afforded clear 
indications of local variation in bird songs. In many instances 
rs a 
