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no relation to voice, and none of them has any modulation, or bears even the slightest resemblance to song. The songs of the birds, on the other hand, are distinct vocal sounds; and there is a very peculiar provision made for the power and compass of their musical instrument, to which there is nothing equal or even resembling in any other class of animals. The beasts, or mammalia (sucklers of their young), as they are technically called, all have voice to some extent or other, but that voice is never musical; and what is remarkable, it is incapable of improvement by artificial teaching. Many birds can be taught to pipe with the greatest accuracy musical airs, even though they contain semi-tones and trills, which are of very difficult execution by the human voice, or upon a musical instrument. Not a few, also, can be taught to articulate words, and sing songs, equally true to the sense and the music. When we find, in birds, which have little external resemblance to human beings, those perfect imitations of what may be regarded as the most pleasing sounds of the human voice, analogy would lead us to conclude that we should have the same imitations in greater perfection from the mammalia, and especially from those mammalia which, externally and internally, have the nearer resemblance to human beings, the monkeys, and still more the apes. Those creatures, more especially the monkeys, are certainly noisy enough; but whether the sounds which they utter happen to express pleasure or pain, satisfaction or anger, they are invariably disagreeable; and in some of the tropical forests, where the loudest tongued species

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are numerous, their howlings are terrific to one unacquainted with them. If we were to muster the whole list of this class of animals, we should not be able to find a single approximation to music, or any thing which could be called a spirit-awakening cry. There are no doubt many of the voices of those animals which are agreeable to us. The baying of the watch-dog, for instance; the bleating of the ewe, and the little voice of her own lamb, which alone answers to her out of the hundred which may be sporting together on the green sward. But in these, and in all cases in which the voices of beasts are pleasurable to us, the pleasure is not in the voice itself, but in something we associate with it. When we are weary and worn with wandering in an unknown and thinly-inhabited country, the barking of a dog is always pleasant to the ear; but it is so because it gives us hope that we are near a human dwelling; we love the deep sound of the watch-dog wafted on the still air of a dark night, because it announces to us that the faithful creature is on the alert, and at his post, while his master sleeps in perfect security. In like manner the bleating of the ewe, and the response of the lamb, give us pleasure by the example they afford of tender attachment between the mother and the offspring.

How different are the songs of birds from all these! They are all musical, and every one of them is a song of joy and excitement, both to the utterer and to those for whose sake it is uttered. The male bird is the prime songster; and generally, though not always, the only one. This song, too, is given immediately before,

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and during the severest labours of the birds; and therefore it in some way contributes to spirit them on to those labours, and bear them up under their pressure. The fact is not universal; but it is pretty general that those birds which build elaborate nests, are much more vocal than those which form rude ones, or no nests at all. The gallinaceous birds of rich plains, such as partridges and pheasants, have cries, which are often shrill and piercing, and have much tone in them, but they never upon any occasion amount to any thing that deserves the name of music. Resident birds have also, generally speaking, less song than migrant ones, and birds which frequent the open downs and the bleak moors have less than those which nestle in the groves and thickets. The sky-lark may seem an exception to this, but it is not one in reality; for though the skylark does not frequent the woods, it is a comparatively concealed bird upon the ground, among the brown clods during the early part of the season, and among the tall herbage after the season is farther advanced. Sufficient attention has not, however, been paid to this curious subject for enabling us to say what the specific effect of song generally, or of any one song in particular, has upon the birds which utter it. That it is connected with the grand labour of the year, there is not the least doubt; for if the female or the nest is destroyed, before the brood are brought to maturity, the male bird sings anew; an unpaired male sings throughout the whole season; and a male kept in captivity, and removed from the natural influence of the seasons, sings at all times of the year. These songs,

especially the last mentioned, are unnatural ones, however; and though we admire them because we can hear them at times, and in places where their wild song cannot be heard, they want the natural freshness and hearty glee with which the free denizen of the air pours forth his notes, when the Spring is young, and all is full of hope. The confined bird may be taught to imitate human music, and that it can be so taught is curious; but the wild note in free nature is that which is most pleasing to a rightly-constituted ear.

Our resident birds, the Spring bleatings of our flocks, and other sounds produced by creatures which summer and winter with us, give us the beginning of the Spring; and there are some of the very remote and elevated parts of Britain in which the season has scarcely any other music than is afforded by these. In the richer districts, however, the case is different; and the wanderers from afar come thronging in, one after another, as the Spring advances. No two of these have exactly the same note; and no two of them adopt exactly the same locality as a nursing-place for the year. Not a few of them also resort only to particular districts; and as they must do so, because those districts are best adapted for feeding them, their distribution becomes a key to some other parts of the history of nature. They and their food require a little more notice than we have already given them; but as this chapter is long, we shall make them the subject of the

next.

CHAPTER VIII.

SPRING-VISITANT BIRDS, AND THEIR FOOD.

THE Spring movement of the feathered tribes, as accompanying, or rather as following, the apparent declination of the sun, is not only one of the most marked features of the vernal season, but it is one which, more than most others, proves to us that the provident goodness of the Almighty Ruler extends equally to every portion of our globe, and to every creature by which any one portion of it is inhabited.

At the time when the birds begin their northward movement, food for them has failed in the extreme south, in consequence of the long-continued heat and drought of the antarctic summer. They therefore begin to move northward, guided no doubt by the supply of food, just as sheep are guided along the more verdant parts of an extensive hill pasture, where they shun those places that afford them no subsistence, and follow the lines of the fertile ones, however crooked these may be. These birds proceed by stages; and though the movement extends a considerable way southward of the equator, it has, in different species of birds, its beginning over a very extensive range of latitude.