i86 
NATURE NOTES. 
which can still be clearly made out ; and that when he actually 
learns another bird’s song, his own song is in general still trace- 
able. 
After all, we shall probably find it safest to say that, in 
regard to the making of nests and songs, birds acquire their 
knowledge of both in much the same way that human beings do ; 
there is really little difference between the modes in which such 
knowledge is acquired. Caves, mud-huts, and pile-dwellings 
existed for ages, with little alterations or improvements ; and in 
some countries such things continue to exist at this very day. 
It took men many centuries to rise from rudest music, learned 
perhaps at earliest from bird-songs, to the music that we now 
delight in ; and improvements in both architecture and music 
are still going on. Why may it not be something the same in 
regard to birds ? We may be quite sure that, though following 
some general type, songs and nests vary much in different places. 
The materials from which nests are formed may be far more 
plentiful in one place than in another ; the powers of the builders 
as to beak, legs and feet may vary ; and the organs of song in 
one bird may be very much more powerful than in another. 
And who can say that though men may, in former times, have 
learnt from bird-songs, the birds may not, in their turn, have 
learnt from the music made by men and women ? German 
canaries, when very young, are taught to sing by musical instru- 
ments ; and they become, by such training, the very best of 
home-singing birds ; and a very slight acquaintance with cage 
birds shows us that a bad singer readily learns from a good one, 
if the training is begun in early youth. 
Far too much is, in our days, referred to instinct by people 
who do not quite comprehend what instinct really is. Savages 
are often said to find their way through trackless regions by 
instinct, and to effect by this faculty many things which it is 
beyond the power of civilized man to do at all. Now the fact 
that savages find their way through forests they have never 
traversed before can be quite easily accounted for without any 
reference to instinct, which has nothing to do with this power. 
To call in the aid of a nfew and mysterious power to account for 
what could be performed by the aid of observation, memory, and 
imitation, is quite unnecessary, and should at once be given up. 
By crediting birds with the same faculties, and the amount of 
reason that we cannot refuse to accord to them, we may learn 
that it is from these powers, and not from blind instinct, as it is 
usually termed, that there arise the pretty nests that some of 
them are able to build, and the sweet songs that we so much 
love to listen to. 
Nestling linnets have been trained by placing them under 
skylark and woodlark; and in every case the young birds have 
invariably caught the note of their instructors. A goldfinch 
taken from the nest when two or three days old, was hung at a 
window opposite a small garden where there was a wren’s nest. 
