MENTAL POWERS OF MAN AND LOWER ANIMALS. 187 



instinctively ; but the actual song, and even the call- 

 notes, are learned from their parents or foster-parents. 

 These sounds, as Daines Barrington has proved, " are no 

 more innate than language is in man." The first attempts 

 to sing "may be compared to the imperfect endeavor in 

 a child to babble." The young males continue practic- 

 ing, or, as the bird-catchers say, " recording," for ten or 

 eleven months. Their first essays show hardly a rudi- 

 ment of the future song ; but as they grow older we can 

 perceive what they are aiming at ; and at last they are 

 said "to sing their song round." Nestlings which have 

 learned the song of a distinct species, as with the canary- 

 birds educated in the Tyrol, teach and transmit their new 

 song to their offspring. The slight natural differences of 

 song in the same species inhabiting different districts may 

 be appositely compared, as Barrington remarks, " to pro- 

 vincial dialects " ; and the songs of allied though distinct 

 species may be compared with the languages of distinct 

 races of man. I have given the foregoing details to show 

 that an instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not pe- 

 culiar to man. 



"With respect to the origin of articulate language, 

 after having read on the one side the highly interesting 

 works of Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, the Rev. F. Farrar, 

 and Professor Schleicher, and the celebrated lectures of 

 Professor Max Muller on the other side, I can not doubt 

 that language owes its origin to the imitation and modifi- 

 cation of various natural sounds, the voices of other ani- 

 mals, and man's own instinctive cries, aided by signs and 

 gestures. 



Page 87 ^ * 8 ' therefore, probable that the imitation 



of musical cries by articulate sounds may have 



given rise to words expressive of various complex emo- 



