110 OUR NATIVE SONGSTERS. 



frequenting the solitary banks of reedy streams 

 and ditches, it can have few opportunities of 

 hearing the notes of the chimney swallow, and 

 much less of the house sparrow, even were 

 it disposed to learn them. And among some 

 hundreds of these birds which we have listened 

 to, in the most varied situations in the three king- 

 doms, all seemed to have very nearly the same 

 notes, repeated in the same order, a fact which 

 appears to us to be fiital to the inference of the 

 notes being derived not from one, but from a 

 number of other birds. For if this were so, it is 

 not possible tliat these imitated notes should all 

 follow in exactly the same order in the song of 

 each individual imitation, in different and distant 

 parts of the country. The close similarity of tlie 

 notes to those alleged to be imitated, cannot indeed 

 be denied; but taking all the circumstances into 

 account, we think it much more probable that 

 these resembling notes are original to the sedge- 

 bird, and that we might with equal justice ac- 

 cuse the swallow and the skylark of borrowing 

 from it." 



Wliite calls this bird the delicate Polyglot, yet 

 its best notes are not to be compared for sweet- 



