GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 93 



but at best the reptilian vocal apparatus is 

 rudimentary in the extreme. Hence in those 

 days when the bird was just struggling away 

 from the clumsiest and worst hindering char- 

 acteristics of the reptile, it certainly possessed 

 no vocal organs of any great power. It would 

 appear doubtful whether it had any at all, 

 since so few birds, even now, have a singing 

 voice, and since, after all these ages of devel- 

 opment, the reptile's voice is scarcely a voice 

 at best. It is a curious fact that frogs and 

 toads, amphibians, have the best developed vo- 

 cal organs of all the reptiles, and that they arc 

 not properly scale-bearing ; and yet it is from 

 the scale-bearing reptiles that our birds have 

 sprung. Perhaps the common toad comes 

 nearer than any known reptile to the posses- 

 sion of a singing voice, though the tree-frogs 

 have a peculiar chirp or squeak not unlike 

 certain notes of the woodpeckers. One might 

 stop here and indulge the pretty impression 

 that the toad in the summer grass and the 

 tree-frog among the green branches register 

 the highest possibilities of reptilian song 

 genius, whilst the mocking-bird, the brown 

 thrush, and the nightingale assert the tri- 

 umph of the race which long ago departed 

 from the groove of that lower estate, by 

 changing scales to feathers, legs to wings, and 

 that rudimentary vocal apparatus into the 

 syrinx, with which to charm the poets of all 

 time! 



The crocodiles, including our alligator, have 

 the tongue attached all round in the mouth, 

 so that it cannot be much used, and it is at 

 this point, so far as the power of vocalization 

 is concerned, that song-birds have departed 

 farthest from the scale-bearing rej^tiles; for 

 the tongues of our musical oscines are tbor- 



