NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 275 



The Evolution of Bird-Song : ivith Observations on the Influence 

 of Heredity and Imitation. By Charles A. Witchell, 

 Author of the ' Fauna of Gloucestershire.' 8vo, pp. i-x, 

 1-253. London : A. & C. Black. 1890. 



The songs and cries of birds have attracted the attention 

 of mankind from ancient times to the present day, and sports- 

 men, poets, and many others as well as naturalists, have con- 

 sidered these subjects. The references to the voices of birds, in 

 books treating even to a limited extent of ornithology, are 

 exceedingly numerous ; but, practically, all of them are generali- 

 zations from the habits of one or two individual birds under 

 observation. The music (as writers term the intervals of musical 

 pitch) uttered by birds has often been mentioned with some 

 attempt at description in notation, as in Gardiner's ' Music 

 of Nature' (1832), Smee's 'My Garden' (1872), and especially 

 in Cheney's 'Wood Notes Wild' (1892), which work treats at 

 great length of this branch of the subject under discussion. 



But investigation of the origin and meanings of the notes 

 of birds has been less often attempted, and apparently with less 

 success. The most important observations on this theme, 

 written in the last century, were those of the Hon. Daines 

 Barrington (Roy. Soc. Phil. Trans, vol. lxiii. 1773, pp. 249-291), 

 which are still quoted as the most conclusive proof of the power 

 of mimicry in perpetuating the vocal characteristics of certain 

 song-birds. But beyond the record of his personal experiments 

 in subjecting young birds to the influence of foster-parents 

 of other musical species, his treatment of the voice in birds is 

 of little value ; indeed, his analysis of song itself merely resulted 

 in an arbitrary division of " songs " from " cries," by the test of 

 their comparative duration. 



In 1833 appeared ' The Domestic Habits of Birds,' published 

 in the "Library of Entertaining Knowledge," in which bird-song 

 received somewhat extensive treatment; but the author of this 

 section of the book discredited the imitativeness of our wild 

 song-birds, even in so polyglot a species as the Sedge Warbler ; 

 and Bennie's statement that the individuals of this species which 

 he heard even in different parts of the country, uttered not only 

 the same notes resembling those of other birds, but also in the 



