160 BIRDS 



writes of the "mournful thrush," a ridiculous epithet, 

 whether applied to the quality of the song or the tem- 

 perament of the bird. Many books about animals, again, 

 are stuffed with anthropomorphism. Their authors endow 

 their animals with what they conceive to be emotions and 

 actions of primitive men, forgetting that beasts often 

 behave like human beings, not because they are human, 

 but because the spirit that moves us to behave like men 

 is the identical spirit that moves beasts to behave like 

 beasts. The confusion is between the spirit and its appro- 

 priate expressions, and the beast that is like itself justifies 

 its existence as the beast that is made to caricature man 

 can never do. The world is all one creation, but each 

 creature possesses its particular ' ' virtues and operations ' ' 

 as Raleigh says, and Joey's remarkable capacities are 

 super-gullish rather than sub-human. 



DOVE RECKONING 



I have often thought of recording a curious fact, for 

 which I can vouch from my own knowledge, and the 

 question raised in your paper, as to whether dogs can 

 count, encourages me to do so now. During the summer 

 of 1887 my children were given a pair of doves, whose 

 arrival in a shoe-box, from a kindly farmer's wife, caused 

 great joy. The doves spent their lives in a huge cage 

 (the enforced regular cleaning days gradually took the 

 keenest edge off the joy), in close proximity to an old 

 cuckoo clock. Jubilee, the " father dove " as he was 

 called, developed into a magnificent bird, and his deep- 

 voiced " coo " was music indeed. For ten years he 

 reigned in the great cage, outliving his first wife Victoria 

 and at least one other spouse, and helping to raise many 

 families. Circumstances, alas ! ordained at last that his 

 home and that of his owners should be broken up, and he 

 was sent to an aviary in the New Forest for the rest of 

 his happy life. But the gist of the story is this. From 



