THE PLAY OP ANIMALS. 203 



Caesar. Kristan von Hamle, one of the lesser Thurin- 

 gian minnesingers, expressed the wish in 1225: 



" Oh, that the green grass too could speak 

 As doth the parrot in his cage ! " 



And Celius tells us that the parrot belonging to Car- 

 dinal Ascanius could recite the twelve articles of faith.* 



This highly developed impulse of imitation in the 

 parrot is probably due to the unusual intricacy of their 

 native language. Marshall says: " One must hear them 

 when they do not know that they are observed, and 

 when a pair chat together, to appreciate their fulness of 

 tone and the variety of meaning they can convey in 

 one of their long conversations." f To learn speech so 

 complicated as this requires imitative power, and in this 

 case it seems especially developed in the imitation of 

 sounds, t 



In selecting some examples to insert here I regret 

 being obliged to omit a very remarkable one related by 

 Brehm. In his battle for individual reason against 

 instinct he became strangely credulous, and all his ex- 

 amples bearing on that topic are under the shadow 

 of that imputation. The following collection, how- 

 ever, is vouched for as unimpeachable by Karl Russ, in 

 his Feathered World. Of the wonderful gray parrot 

 belonging to Director Kastner in Vienna it is said: 

 u For a while after coming to us he spoke only when 

 alone in the room, but soon took to chattering without 

 noticing his surroundings, joining heartily in a laugh, 



* W. Marshall, Die Papageien, Leipsic, 1889, p. 3. 



t Ibid., p. 42. 



\ It is worthy of note that I have not been able to find a single 

 instance of imitation of the speech of other beings, either man or 

 animal, by a monkey ; and yet many kinds have a well-developed 

 language of their own. 



