How Animals Talk 



returned to the house, and never again joined our 

 play or allowed a boy to come near him. 



Not all crows have this "gift of speech"; and 

 the fact that one tame crow learns to use a few 

 English words, while five or six others hold fast 

 to their own lingo, has led to the curious belief 

 that, if you want to make a crow talk, you must 

 split his tongue. How such a belief originated is a 

 mystery; but it was so fixed and so widespread 

 when I was a boy that no sooner was a young crow 

 taken from a nest than jack-knives were sharpened, 

 and the leathery end of the crow's tongue was 

 solemnly split after grave debate whether a 

 seventh or a third part was the proper medicine. 

 If the crow talked after that, it was proof positive 

 that the belief was true; and if he remained dumb, 

 it was a sign that there was something wrong in 

 the splitting; which is characteristic of a large 

 part of our natural-history reasoning. The de- 

 bates I have heard or read on the "unanswerable" 

 question of how a chipmunk digs a hole without 

 leaving any earth about the entrance (a question 

 with the simplest kind of an answer) are mostly 

 suggestive of the split-tongue superstition of crow 

 language. 



Of the tame crows I have chanced to observe, 

 only a small proportion showed any tendency to 

 repeat words; and these gifted ones are, I judge, 



[16] 



