THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
MARCH, 1S89. 
THE MIMETIC ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT 
OF BIRD LANGUAGE. 
WHATELY, Archbishop of Dublin, remarked a half-cen- 
tury since, — " man is not the only animal that can make 
use of language to express what is passing in his mind and can 
understand, more or less, what is so expressed by another;" a 
remark which echoes with the increasing emphasis of another 
fifty years, the pious poet's couplet — 
Darwin thinks " the sounds uttered by birds offer in several 
respects the nearest analogy to language : for all the members 
of the same species utter the same instinctive cries expressive 
of their emotions, and all the kinds that have the power of 
singing, exert this power instinctively, but the actual song is 
learned from their parents or foster-parents." 
The longer this subject is critically considered, the more are 
we convinced that the communication of ideas by means of 
sound and gesture (language) is instinctive and common to all 
animals ;— that it is a genetically transmitted faculty, quite in- 
dependent, in its earliest manifestations, of experiential or em- 
piric knowledge, and that laws, governing the development of 
