182 WOOD NOTES WILD. 



NIGHTINGALE AND HIS RIVALS. Contin. 



For choice passages on the song of the nightingale see F. A. Knight's 

 delightful little volume, " Idylls of the Field," pp. 93-94. 



See also Hamerton, P. G. : Chapters on Animals, chap. 13. Dom. 

 Habits of Birds. (Lib. Enter. Knowl, pp. 284-289.) Lescuyer, F. : 

 Langage et Chant des Oiseaux (Paris, 1878), pp. 67-71. Litt. Liv. Age, 

 vol. xxv., 1850, pp. 273-278; vol. xlii., 1854, pp. 612-614. Plinius Se- 

 cundus, C. : Natural History, bk. x. chap, xliii. Die Vogelsprache. 

 (Gartenlaube, 1866, pp. 705-707.) 



" But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such 

 sweet, loud music out of her little instrumental throat that it might make 

 mankind to think that miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, 

 when the very laborer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have often, the 

 clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling 

 and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, 

 Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in Heaven, when thou 

 aff ordest bad men such music on earth ! " Walton, I. : The Complete 

 Angler (London, 1875), p. cxiv. 



See also Aristophanes : The Birds. (In his Comedies, vol. i. pp. 

 301-386.) 



Imported Songsters. 



Thanks to the enterprise of the West, we need no longer 

 go to the books sent us from beyond the sea to hear the 

 old-world songsters, the birds immortalized by Keats and 

 Shelley, the birds sung and descanted upon by hundreds 

 of others less famous. Mr. C. F. Pfluger, Secretary of the 

 Society for the Introduction of Useful Singing-birds into 

 Oregon, writes under date of Dec. 22, 1890, as follows : 



"In the month of May, 1889, the society imported from 

 Clausthal, in Germany, under a contract with a German bird- 

 dealer, the following birds in pairs of males and females, viz. : 

 Ten pairs of black-headed nightingales, eight pairs of gray 

 song thrushes, fifteen pairs of black song thrushes, twenty-two 

 pairs of skylarks, four pairs of singing quail, twenty pairs of 

 black starlings, nineteen bullfinches, three of which were females 

 and sixteen males ; the rest of the females had died on the way ; 



