VI On the Songs of Birds 149 



this tongue is as a rule a beautiful one, because the 

 life of the birds is itself beautiful — not only for the 

 short time of courting, but beautiful and free all the 

 year. It is the joyful life of the birds that has made 

 their songs so grateful to us. 



Let us now turn for a moment to yet another 

 question. How do birds learn the peculiar songs 

 and call -notes of their species, so that generation 

 after generation keeps them up with little or no 

 modification ? This is a question on which our great 

 naturalists seem to be fairly well agreed ; ^ but the 

 evidence cannot be said to be very extensive or 

 complete, except for caged birds, and it is curious 

 that most of the experiments that have been made 

 with these date as far back as the last century. 

 Daures Barrington, the friend of Gilbert White, — the 

 same man who a few years earlier had reported to 

 the Eoyal Society on the extraordinary natural gift 

 of a great human musician, then the child Mozart, — 

 recorded in 1773 a number of experiments with 

 young birds ; and his notes form the staple of the 

 evidence used both by Darwin and Wallace. He 

 came very decidedly to the conclusion that birds 

 learn their song hy imitating their parents' voice; 

 and that if you take them early from the nest, and 

 place them near other birds, they will imitate these 

 instead. If you put them to school with a single 

 1 Wallace, Ncdural Selection (ed. 1891), p. 104. 



