TALKING BIRDS 
i43 
song, not their own, which they have transmitted to 
their posterity. 
The following account of the development of the 
talking power in a young parrot of which we have 
seen much lately, is, we submit, a strong confirmation 
of this view. Our informant is a lady whose sympathies 
are by no means limited to parrots, as the context will 
show, and her observations are wholly reliable. “We 
bought c Barry,’ ” she writes, “ when he was quite young 
before his feathers were fully grown ; and we had him 
about a year before he began to talk. Then he began 
to make very odd noises, as if he were trying to say 
words, but could not quite do it. Now he constantly 
learns new words and sentences, and early in the morn- 
ing I hear him practising them over to himself, exactly 
as our babies used to do in the early morning hours in bed. 
If he improves as much in the next ten years as he 
has in the last, he should be able to recite a poem if 
we teach him.” There is no reason w r hy a parrot 
should not continue to increase his stock of phrases as 
he grows older, if the supposition that he looks upon 
it as an accomplishment for which he is in some way 
the better is correct. The butcher-bird, for instance, 
and the sedge- warbler do not rest satisfied with learning 
their own notes, but often learn and reproduce the 
notes of other birds in great perfection. The mocking- 
bird, which, like the sedge-warbler, has a fine song of 
its own, does the same. But the parrot has an 
advantage in being very long-lived and constantly in 
human company. The young parrot mentioned 
