148 
NATURE NOTES. 
who was dissecting birds in the Oxford Museum, I was able to 
show the Oxford Natural History Society that though the 
musical mechanism of a bird is essentially the same as that of a 
clarinet or oboe, it is played on in a manner so entirely different 
that its music cannot be produced on our musical scale. As I 
write these very lines, the voice of a thrush comes in from my 
garden through the open door, and seems to say, “ Tell them so; 
tell them so ; it can’t be tamed, it sha’n’t be tamed.” While 
reading this book I have listened to the black-cap, chiff-chaff, 
yellow hammer, tree pipit, and many others, and they all, with 
one consent, implore me to be loyal to their wood notes wild. 
What Mr. Cheney really did, as the accounts of his pro- 
cedure clearly show, was to listen to a bird’s song patiently 
until it suggested to his mind a phrase or phrases of our artificial 
and artistic music. This may very well be so, as cases are on 
record where a bird’s song has thus suggested the leading phrase 
of a great musical composition, as in the first movement of 
Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor. But such phrases are not 
truly what the bird actually sings, and this explanation of Mr. 
Cheney’s method quite accounts for certain absurdities in this 
volume, such as the “ wild melody whirled out by a clothes rack,” 
which is strongly suggestive of Wagner, or the reduction to our 
musical notation of sounds which are not really musical at all, 
such as the purring of a cat or the braying of an ass. Yet the 
book is an interesting one, in spite of the fact that it is based on 
a delusion ; and it has one great merit, for it contains a pretty 
complete account, with quotations, of all that has recently been 
Avritten on the subject of birds’ songs, whether favourable or not 
to the point of \deAV taken by the author. 
W. Warde Fowler. 
MISS NORTH’S FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS.- 
It is a pity that Messrs. Macmillan did not place more confidence in the healthy 
taste of the public for the strong personal character and dry humour of Marianne 
North, and boldly publish her Recollections of a Happy Life in their natural 
order with an index and appendix, as we suggested in a former notice, instead of 
making the reader pul down the first volume at page 38, take up these Further 
Recollectio 7 is, and return after their conclusion to the year 1870. The supplemen- 
tary volume contains fascinating impressions of persons, places, and things, seen in 
Spain, Italy, Syria, Egypt, Sicily and elsewhere, between the years 1859 and 1870. 
With varied knowledge, a good memory, and a dry odd way of regarding her 
fellow creatures, the authoress, carrying us from peak to plain, makes the well- 
known byeways of fresh interest by recalling the forgotten or unnoticed geological 
formation and its characteristic flora and fauna. In the towns and villages we are 
introduced to people of flesh and blood, become acquainted with them, live 
with them and the writer, panting under the southern sun, half-stifled in Sicilian 
quarries, or frozen on Mount Lebanon. 
* Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life, selected from the Journals of 
Marianne North. Macmillan & Co., 8s. 6d. net. 
