96 SYLVAN SECRETS. 



be, The short-bills twitter and whistle, the 

 long-bills sing. The blue- jay is the most 

 melodious of the whistlers, whilst the quail 

 (bob-white) and the cardinal grossbeak are 

 the most powerful whistlers of all our birds. 



It has been somewhat taken for granted by 

 our ornithologists that all the birds belong- 

 ing to the subdivision named oscines, or sing- 

 ers, have the vocal organs necessary to song. 

 Even Dr. Coues remarks that the rook, 

 though "a corvine croaker," has a "syrinx 

 in good order, though he has never learned 

 to play " on it . Now, I have never had the 

 opportunity of dissecting a rook's vocal or- 

 gans ; but I am able to say that such corvine 

 croakers as I have examined are not pos- 

 sessed of a song-making apparatus to be at 

 all compared with that of the cat-bird, the 

 brown thrush, or the mocking-bird. MacgiJ- 

 livray's figures will have to be greatly mod- 

 ified when applied to the best of our Ameri- 

 can songsters. Professor Miiller's researches 

 in the comparative anatomy of vocal organs 

 in birds, and Professor Huxley's admirably 

 clear description, have failed fully to recog- 

 nize the office of the tongue and posterior 

 walls of the mouth in dperentiating and 

 modifying the notes of a bird's song. It ap- 

 pears to me that the oversight, or partial 

 oversight, has arisen from taking it for 

 granted that the bronchi- tracheal syrinx is 

 the absolute and sole song organ in birds, in- 

 stead of being merely the voice generator in 

 song-birds. For example, the parrot has no 

 septum in his syrinx, and but three pairs of 

 intrinsic muscles, and yet his voice is a won- 

 der of flexibility an.d elasticity. Melody is 

 lacking:, because one of the vocal cords (the 

 septum with its membrane) is gone; but high 



