5 
with a good deal of fuss on feathers without any well defined cause. I 
should say in the instance of the Catbird singing, in Mr. Peck’s paper, 
that it sang, from pure expression of enjoyment in the music. The simi¬ 
larity in the evidences of kindred endowments in birds and the human 
species gives us a human interpretation. We have covered a great field 
with the word instinct to account for that which is not easy to explain, 
and made it stand for something inferior to reason in the mind of the 
thinker. So we cover bird life with its architectural display of reasoning 
faculties, its knowledge of the points of the compass, its unerring migra¬ 
tory courses, its time of coming and going at certain ■ dates, with even its 
knowledge of unvarying notes in a scale, as instinctive. We might say 
that, if they were blind and deaf. They show ns in all these things that 
we read them with closed understandings, or not at all. When my birds 
arrive in the spring, a half dozen varieties reaching the grounds in the 
night, and I go out to find in some instances, all singing at the same dime 
I may be mistaken but it seems like a song of thanksgiving whether it is 
really so or not. I must differ with Mr. Peck also in the length of time 
that birds sing. The air is full of bird song in the morning and on sunny 
days in March—-many birds having arrived early in the month. Nesting 
time is a long way off, and if one is afield in August and September, the 
song sparrow announces himself as emphatically as in the early spring. 
Meadow larks sing after they have gathered in flocks for migration, and 
so with blue birds. In March the Juncos will fill a tree and all sing at a 
time, and Canadian tree sparrows can be heard on the sunny side of a 
mill any day in the winter, if it is not too cold. But the subject is inter¬ 
minable and will not admit of much argument in a short paper. It would 
appear as if the question of where the voice is situated in a bird’s 
throat cannot be definitely settled by evidence. What chance has it 
through research in solving the problem of why a., bird sings? It. is self 
evident that we cannot interpret from any fixed standard, and the psy¬ 
chic point of view is as tenable as any other. There is no doubt that the 
different cries and sounds from birds, all have their meaning and express 
alarm, fear, pain and even hate. Birds may dwell together in peace, but 
they congregate with their own species, and do not take to mixed com¬ 
munities. They are necessarily mixed in nesting time, when a truce ap¬ 
pears to be held for business purposes. 
