could be ; they are also the species least 

 afraid of enemies. In Brazil, it is said, 

 they may often be seen moving about in 

 pairs in the evening with as little attempt 

 at concealment as storks in Germany. 



Even the New Zealand owl-parrot still 

 retains many traces of his original green- 

 ness, mixed with the brown and dingy 

 yellow of his nocturnal and burrowing 

 nature. 



I now turn to the parrot's power of 

 mimicry in human language. This power 

 is only an incidental result of the general 

 intelligence of parrots, combined with the 

 other peculiarities of their social life and 

 forestine character. Dominant wood- 

 land animals, like monkeys and parrots, 

 at least if vegetarian in their habits, are 

 almost always gregarious, noisy, mis- 

 chievous, and imitative. And the imita- 

 tion results directly from a somewhat 

 high order of intelligence. The power 

 of intellect, in all except the very highest 

 phases, is merely the ability to accurately 

 imitate another. Monkeys imitate action 

 to a great extent, but their voices are 

 hardly flexible enough for very much 



mimicry of the human voice. Parrots 

 and some other birds, on the contrary, 

 like the mocking bird, being endowed 

 with considerable flexibility of voice, imi- 

 tate either songs or spoken words with 

 great distinctness. In the parrot the 

 power of attention is also very considera- 

 ble, for the bird will often repeat to itself 

 the lesson it has decided to learn. But 

 most of us forget that at best the parrot 

 knows only the general application of a 

 sentence, not the separate meanings of its 

 component words. It knows, for exam- 

 ple, that "Polly wants a lump of sugar" 

 is a phrase often followed by a gift of 

 food. But to believe it can understand 

 an exclamation like "What a homely lot 

 of parrots!" is to credit the bird with 

 genuine comprehension. A careful con- 

 sideration of the evidence has convinced 

 almost all scientific men that, at the most, 

 a parrot knows the meaning of a sentence 

 in the same way as a dog understands the 

 meaning of "Rats" or a horse knows the 

 significance of "Get up." 



Lawrence Irwell. 



How can our fancies help but go 



Out from this realm of mist and rain, 

 Out from this realm of sleet and snow, 



When the first Southern violets blow? 



— Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "Spring in New England." 



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