DlULUUT 
 
 LIBRARY 
 

SYLYAtf SECEETS, 
 
 IN 
 
 BIRD-SONGS AND BOOKS. 
 
 BY 
 
 MAUKICE THOMPSON. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES," "SONGS OF FAIK 
 
 WEATHER," "THE WITCHERY OF 
 
 ARCHERY," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER. 
 
 1887. 
 
Copyright, 1887, 
 BY 
 
 THE PROVIDENT BOOK CO. 
 BIOLOGY 
 LIBRARY 
 
Lib'. 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Preface, 5 
 
 Mind, Memory, and Migration of Birds, - 11 
 
 Beside the Gulf with Ruskin, 26 
 
 Ceryle Alcyon, - 36 
 
 Swamp Sketches, - 40 
 
 In the Matter of Shakespeare, - 58 
 
 The Motif of Bird-Song, - 70 
 
 The Genesis of Bird-Song, - - 85 
 
 The Anatomy of Bird-Song, - 101 
 Some Hyoid Hints, - ... 125 
 
 M520333 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THIS little book is made up after the fashion 
 of Nature's concretions. The parts seemed to 
 have a sort of affinity for one another, with- 
 out, in some instances, any discoverable kin- 
 ship. A sheaf of essays (most of them written 
 in the woods of the South) I offer to the reader 
 just as it was bundled together after appear- 
 ing at intervals and in separate wisps in the 
 Atlantic, Scribner's, the Library, and other 
 magazines. 
 
 From my earliest boyhood to the present 
 hour, I have felt a constant and increasing 
 pleasure in chasing sylvan secrets through 
 sunlight and shadow, by river and brook, on 
 mountain and in valley, all the way back and 
 forth from the lakes of the North to the great 
 Southern gulf. Many of these secrets I have 
 caught, as in a net, a lot of rustling, chirrup- 
 ing, melodious things, like singing birds, or 
 prismatic, glowing, odorous, flower-like vis- 
 ions robbing me of the power of expression, 
 and yet ever demanding description. I have 
 felt no other limitation quite so galling as the 
 inadequacy of my insight. I can see almost 
 to the nucleus of things I can nearly mako 
 out this or that perfect form I almost know 
 what the serpent thinks, what the dove de- 
 sires, what the mocking-bird sings ; but the 
 dainty film is always interposed, just at the 
 moment of triumph, to shut out the perfect 
 conclusion and to leave a haunting half- 
 5 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 knowledge in its place. It has cheered and 
 comforted me not a little to find such men as 
 Huxley and Darwin and Alfred Wallace turn- 
 ing disconsolately away from the same little 
 difficult nebulae that have worried my weaker 
 eyes. 
 
 Possibly I am the only person in the world 
 who ever fancied that the highest form of 
 poetry may lurk in the problems of compara- 
 tive anatomy and physiology. Be this as it 
 may, behind the hints and correlations and 
 suggestions of dry bones and dessicated fossils 
 there appears to me an epic of awful glory 
 and power and significance. What a romance 
 is geology! What a melodrama is life from 
 : ts lowest to its highest forms ! We are apt 
 to look upon Darwin as a realist ; but when 
 we read him well he is a poet like Milton, a 
 dreamer like Pythagoras, a prophet like 
 Daniel, a dramatist like Shakespeare. 
 
 The more I have studied Nature, the more I 
 have become aware of God. When I approach 
 the beginning I find Him, and His hand puts 
 me gently but firmly away, as if to say : "I 
 stand here all alone." When I approach the 
 end, there too is God standing all alone, self- 
 existent, sufficient, unimaginable, at once the 
 cause and the culmination, the germ, the 
 bloom, and the fruit of all things. I do not 
 expect that men ever will find the secret of 
 life locked in a cell or in any other minute 
 division of matter. No analysis of the spe- 
 cialist, no synthesis of the generalizcr can ever 
 pass beyond the vail. God said: ''Let life 
 be," and life was. Still I believe in evolution ; 
 I feel it, I see it ; but it is evolution by God's 
 law, bounded by His limiting purpose. When 
 we study Nature we study Him, not in the 
 materialistic or pantheistic sense, but in the 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 Christian sense. The will of the universe is 
 God's will, because God made the universe, as 
 he made man, and blew into it the energy 
 that fills it. I see no clash between Christian- 
 ity and Science. Geology tells me the same 
 story that Moses and the prophets tell me; 
 the birds sing it, the flowers hint it, the winds 
 murmur it, the aspirations of my soul are 
 founded in it. 
 
 The following essays, however, are not es- 
 pecially devoted to evolution. Indeed some 
 of them are not Nature-studies at all. The 
 one on Shakespeare when it first appeared 
 called down upon me the tremendous hand of 
 a great scholar, and I was cuffed until my 
 ears rang merrily ; but I did not wince, and I 
 would walk five miles to-day to clasp that 
 hand. If some over-earnest follower of Hux- 
 ley, Parker, and Macgillivray shall consider it 
 worth while to show clearly that my conclu- 
 sions in " Hyoid Hints" and the "Anatomy 
 of Bird-song " are erroneous, let him proceed; 
 but until he do this, I shall believe in my de- 
 monstrations with perfect complacency. 
 
 After all, the title, " Sylvan Secrets," under 
 which this booklet goes forth, does not neces- 
 sarily signify that the Secrets are explained ; 
 they may be merely catalogued as precious 
 mysteries, valuable for the very qualities 
 which render them insoluble. Perhaps there 
 may be critics who will imagine that the most 
 obvious secret of all is the motif of my work, 
 and I am quite charitable enough to sympa- 
 thize with the practical spirit of such, al- 
 athough I certainly must have had a purpose 
 other than the mere pleasure of writing. I 
 saw, felt, heard, tasted, dreamed, and fancied, 
 and the substance of all was what I tried to 
 put into words. What is stated as fact must 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 be taken as fact, what is offered as conjecture 
 or inference must be weighed as such, and 
 what appears to be the overflow of a cheerful 
 and optimistic fancy may be done by as the 
 reader please. 
 
 As for me, when I turn these leaves I hear 
 the rustle of wild foliage and wilder wings, 
 the songs of many birds, the bubbling of in- 
 numerable brooks, the wash of surf, and the 
 tumbling of white-caps. Can the reader hear 
 these by the same means? If he can, my 
 writing has not been done without a touch of 
 genius. 
 
 Who reads Nature without the side-light of 
 many books ? How shall one keep the art 
 of literature out of one's interviews with 
 things in the wilderness ? If I hear a thrush 
 or a mocking-bird sing, how shall I hinder 
 the coming of the Persian and Provengal 
 and old English poets with their rhymes 
 about the Nightingale ? Before I know it 
 I am assuming the attitude of a singer, and 
 am posing in Nature's face. How shall I be 
 dumb while the very stars are eloquent ? 
 Here is Theocritus and here is Keats singing 
 away, as young and happy as ever; why 
 shall I not attitudinize in my day and way ? 
 
 "But these essays are incongruous," sug- 
 gests the critic. Well, then, they are incongru- 
 ous ; but what of it ? Nature is incongruous, 
 nay more, it is contradictory, as are certain 
 of my essays. At one time my observations of 
 facts clearly prove one thing ; at another 
 time they certainly establish just the oppo- 
 site thing. I am not sure that this is alto- 
 gether my fault, for Nature is tricksy in her 
 moods and as whimsical, now and again, as 
 any pedagogue. She strings her creations 
 together without rhyme or reason. The 
 
PREPACK 9 
 
 violet and the stramonium, the ground-cherry 
 and the night-shade, the clover and the net- 
 tle, the woodbine and the poison ivy are all 
 bound in a volume. Man has done all the 
 classifying, all the distinctive grouping. It 
 is the botanist, not Nature, who does the as- 
 sorting, separating and naming. The rain 
 and the sunshine find the weed as well as 
 the corn, and touch it as lovingly. 
 
 One of the most distinguished of American 
 scientists chanced to read the paper on the 
 " Anatomy of Bird-song " while it was in the 
 manuscript. "Nobody will care for this, 1 ' 
 he said. u You will not have twenty readers. 
 Why, when I was attending Huxley's lect- 
 ures in London, he spoke to more empty 
 benches than to auditors. The truth is, dry 
 bones are very poor picking at best." 
 
 This was not news to me; but I resented 
 it all the same, for I see in geology, in compar- 
 ative anatomy, in paleontology, in geograph- 
 ical botany, and in comprehensive analysis 
 of Nature generally, the basis of all human 
 inspiration, for these include the universe 
 and man. Divine inspiration comes of God, 
 and is independent. We must take it without 
 a question. Our study of man is feeble and 
 narrow, if we make it all foreground, leav- 
 ing out the perspective of natural history. 
 What is the human story comprised between 
 the oldest monuments and the books of to- 
 day, if we compare it with the story sug- 
 gested by the hints of geology ? What is the 
 romance of the Cid, or the Romance of the 
 Rose, or the Iliad, beside the romance of the 
 peat bogs, or of the coal-measures, or even 
 of the American mounds ? There was a 
 Golden Age of song, there was the idyllic life 
 of Arcadia ; but beyond these there was a 
 
10 PREFACE. 
 
 time when tropic flowers and spicy plants 
 and grasses and odorous fruits grew around 
 the boreal pale. To me all nature is ro- 
 mance ; even the skull of a bird is the flower 
 of a long chanson de geste coming up through 
 a million years of adventure and change 
 from the fish or the saurian. Every species 
 of plant or animal has an heroic significance 
 when I remember what a battle it has fought 
 for existence. When I am out with the trees 
 and the winds and the birds and the flowers, 
 I am consorting with things of ancient ex- 
 traction whose adventures and experiences 
 reach back into the farthest mists of perspec- 
 tive. They have secrets to tell me, but how 
 shall I know when they are told ? 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 MIND, MEMORY AND MIGRATION OF 
 BIRDS. 
 
 WITHOUT preliminary negotiations, or spe- 
 cial preparations of any kind, I took posses- 
 sion of an old building which once had been a 
 "gin-house." Now bear in mind that I do 
 not mean gin-mill when I write gin-house^ 
 for the words are far from synonymous. My 
 new abode was picturesquely dilapidated and 
 stood in the midst of a dense growth of young 
 pine trees. From a window I had a vie\v, 
 through a rift in the foliage, of a small blue 
 lake and a wide stretch of green, rush-cov- 
 ered marsh. An ancient peach and pear 
 orchard was close at hand, the venerable old 
 neglected trees standing knee-deep in a mass 
 of scrubby scions. 
 
 This gin-house, instead of having once been 
 a place where intoxicating drinks were con- 
 cocted and sold, was simply the wreck of an 
 old plantation cotton-gimiing establishment; 
 indeed here was an abandoned and over- 
 grown estate which formerly had been the 
 pride of a Southern planter of great wealth 
 and social and political power. The stately 
 mansion had disappeared, saving the frag- 
 ments and ruins of some stuccoed brick col- 
 umns and the amorphous heaps of rubbish 
 suggestive of chimneys and foundation pil- 
 11 
 
12 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 lars ; nor was there much left to remind one 
 of the agricultural wealth, formerly the 
 largest of this broad area now given over to 
 a thrifty growth of strong young trees and to 
 a wild, musical mob of birds. A considerable 
 marsh, once drained by a rude wind-mill and 
 cultivated in sea-island cotton, had been re- 
 claimed by the tide- water (which now crept 
 in rhythmically through many breaks in the 
 little dyke) and had become a home of the 
 herons and bitterns. Remnants, more pa- 
 thetic than picturesque, of the tall shaft and 
 pumping apparatus belonging to the mill lay 
 in a mouldering and rusting heap beside the 
 water. 
 
 My gin-house was a poor shelter if it should 
 rain, but I could supplement it with my 
 waterproof blanket; and then the climate 
 was very kind at worst. How, indeed, could 
 a climate be more tender in its concessions to 
 one's preferences ? A breeze from the gulf, 
 salty and exhilarating, or a waft from the 
 pine-woods, fragrantly heavy with terebinth 
 and balm, was blowing day and night, and 
 the medley of bird songs was accompanied 
 with the effective counterpoint of the distant 
 sea-moan.. There was romance in the atmos- 
 pheric perspective on both water and land as 
 well as in the story suggested by the ruins all 
 around me, and a few of my readers will 
 readily recall from experience of their own 
 how sweet an auxiliary to realistic study is 
 this influence of romance. Science, through 
 which realism works its only wonders (for 
 realism in fiction is a fraudulent pretence), 
 science, I say, is itself most charming when 
 its light flickers on the filmy and misty verge 
 of Nature's romance, and your genuine, lover 
 of science is far from averse to making his 
 dryest studies under circumstances of the 
 
MIND AND MEMORY OF BIRDS. 13 
 
 most picturesque sort. I do not claim that I 
 chose my old cotton-gin house on. account of 
 its poetical suggestiveness ; this quality was 
 simply a great charm added to a spot pos- 
 sessed of many practical advantages in aid of 
 my purpose, which was a peculiar line of 
 bird-study. 
 
 On one side a fresh -water lakelet, on the 
 other side the Gulf of Mexico great marsh 
 meadows and reaches of sand-bardense for- 
 ests, thickets, old fields given over to Nature, 
 orchards left to the will of the mocking-birds 
 and their friends and foes everything, in- 
 deed, to favor my quest was in view, with 
 the romance and the beauty thrown in for 
 good measure. So, swinging my hammock 
 from the heavy beams of the gin-house loft, 
 and leaving the care of the mule and the 
 spring-wagon to my hired free man of color, 
 who was to be my factotum, I abandoned 
 myself to the study in hand, feeling that for 
 once many elements had joined themselves 
 together to enhance my physical and spirit- 
 ual comfort. Here on the latest fringe of 
 Nature's geological formation, with all the 
 newest discoveries of natural science at hand 
 in the shape of books and memoranda, and 
 with fishes, birds, reptiles and mammals, 
 water of sea, stream and lake, woods, 
 marshes and swamps, with all the range of 
 plants growing in them, what more could I 
 wish ? 
 
 It was comforting to realize what a differ- 
 ence there must be between life now and life 
 some million or more years ago ; for there has 
 been a period in the past when I should have 
 had to be content with sitting upon some 
 bleak, sandy cretaceous shore and studying 
 
14 SYLVAN SECRTES. 
 
 those mockeries of birds with which Nature 
 was fond of experimenting in her infancy. 
 
 Professor Marsh has carefully studied, de- 
 scribed and figured the remains of an ancient 
 bird which he has named Hesperornis re- 
 galis; and which in shape and habits re- 
 sembled a loon. He makes a striking com- 
 parison between the brain cavity of the 
 ancient and that of the modern bird, and 
 draws the inference that, as in the case of 
 mammals and reptiles there has been a steady 
 increase of intelligence in the avian animal 
 from the most remote period of its existence 
 down to the present time. Here is a sugges- 
 tion arising from the fact of this constant 
 brain-development: may not brain-improve- 
 ment, which is another phrase for intelligence- 
 development, account in a large degree for 
 the gradual self -modifying of species to suit 
 the environment ? Darwin's law of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest pre-supposes simply the 
 fittest physically ; but the film of vague intel- 
 ligence primarily planted in the animal no 
 doubt gave the impulse toward the proper 
 habitat and also that initial elasticity, which 
 has became so powerful, rendering self -modi- 
 fication to suit changes in surroundings not 
 only possible but comparatively easy. 
 
 Probably, when ail manner of life was 
 largely elementary and weak, the conditions 
 of change were almost infinitely mild and all 
 the movements of Nature slow and gentle. 
 In those times little intelligence was needed 
 to enable the fittest to survive. It may be 
 assumed that brain and nerve-centres in- 
 creased in size and strength as necessity com- 
 pelled an increase of nervous exercise; but 
 such an assumption compasses a great deal 
 not directly expressed by the phrasing of it, 
 
MIND AND MEMORY OF BIEDS. 15 
 
 for the influence of the mind upon the body, 
 even in the case of a low animal, is great and 
 manifold. Indeed, I believe that the whole 
 matter of physical modification in animals 
 brought about by the exigencies of change in 
 environment, is referable, in an obscure and 
 indirect way, to that influence. What we 
 attempt to express by the word desire is 
 nothing more than a natural (though it may 
 be a sadly debased) impulse toward another 
 state. In its broadest and freest sense desire 
 is merely the initial effort of a being toward 
 a new experience or a lost estate; in other 
 words, it is the consciousness of a need 
 coupled with an impulse in the direction ob- 
 taining it. The mind-cure fraud is based 
 upon the efficacy of desire. The concentra- 
 tion of the mind upon any particular part of 
 the body certainly affects the part, and the 
 effect may be to produce local disturbance of 
 a peculiar kind, or to destroy a result of local 
 lesion, provided the lesion be not more than 
 a disturbance of nervous equilibrium. From 
 the point of view thus taken one may see 
 one's way clear to an inference as simple as it 
 is strong : evolution is the outcome of natu- 
 ral desire, and natural desire has been gener- 
 ated by a disturbance of natural equilibrium. 
 There is nothing abstruse or occult in this 
 proposition ; it is merely a recognition of the 
 development of [intelligence and of the con- 
 trolling power of the brain in animals. 
 
 Professor Marsh, in the course of his ad- 
 mirable monograph on the Odontornithes, 
 or ancient toothed birds, suggests that cer- 
 tain wingless species had become so by non- 
 ttoer of the organs of flight. Perhaps the 
 limit of this proposition would be found coin- 
 hiding with that of brain-influence above 
 
16 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 enunciated. The neglect of an organ implies 
 that the organ is not needed, and that there- 
 fore it is not desired. On the other hand, if 
 the need for an organ increase, the desire for 
 it will strengthen apace, and the organ will 
 be modified in accordance with this natural 
 desire. The trouble about fully comprehend- 
 ing this law lies in our proneness to confining 
 our idea of its operation within the space of 
 a few years, as compared with the almost 
 immeasurable ages of geologic time through- 
 out which the law has operated with the 
 effects we now observe. If we can force our 
 minds to consider a million years, for in- 
 stance, as the minimum space of time requi- 
 site to effect the elimination of a useless organ 
 by the operation of natural desire, transmit- 
 ted by heredity, we shall begin to feel the 
 perfect reasonableness of our proposition. 
 
 Going a step farther, I think there is much 
 evidence tending to prove that birds are en- 
 dowed with what may be called hereditary 
 memory and hereditary desire. It seems that 
 if ever man possessed this hereditament he 
 has lost it in the over-development of his 
 higher mental powers. 
 
 I have noted the following facts : 
 
 A bird, when reared in captivity and far 
 from any of its kind, will utter exactly the 
 notes of its ancestors. It will also build a nest 
 after the fashion prescribed by ancestral hab- 
 it. It will feed its young in accordance with 
 hereditary custom. It will migrate, or not, 
 as ancestral influence directs. It will capture 
 its food after the style and by the same means 
 established in its tribe by immemorial usage. 
 It will seek the habitat always haunted by its 
 kind. 
 
 I knew a boy who took a pair of unfledged 
 
MIND AND MEMOEY OF BIRDS. 17 
 
 woodpeckers from the parental nest and 
 reared them by hand. He kept them in a 
 cage nearly a year, and then freed them. 
 They lingered about the premises and soon 
 pecked a hole in a dead pear tree, after the 
 true picus pattern, and therein reared a 
 brood. Nest-architecture evidently was her- 
 editary with them. 
 
 I have heard a mocking-bird, reared in 
 captivity and alone in a Northern state, utter, 
 with absolute precision, the characteristic cry 
 of a Southern bird whose voice it never had 
 heard in its life. 
 
 It will be evident to every close observer 
 that the habit of living in a cage is becoming 
 hereditary with the canary bird. 
 
 Domestic fowls are losing, by an infinitesi- 
 mal process, their wing-power. The need for 
 flight is diminishing and with it the natural 
 desire for wings. The body and legs and 
 brain of these birds are rapidly increasing in 
 weight and strength. On the other hand, our 
 domestic fowls have largely lost their ances- 
 tral traits hereditary memory with them is 
 beginning to go no farther back than to the 
 limit of this domestic state of existence. 
 
 I witnessed a striking incident in bird life 
 which was very suggestive : a wild goose, by 
 some accident separated from its flock on the 
 spring flight northward, circled low in the 
 air uttering now and again its loud cry. A 
 domestic gander preening himself beside a 
 meadow brook, heard the clanging voice and 
 lifting his head answered it with emphasis. 
 I could not help wondering if an almost irre- 
 sistible wave of memory had indeed been 
 started in the brain of the domestic bird by 
 this low-flying migrant. Dimly, perhaps, but 
 wildly, sweetly, came in the old hereditary 
 
18 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 desire for the far northern water-brinks, 
 along with an elusive and tantalizing recol- 
 lection of a time, thousands of years ago, 
 when he, in the body of a remote forebear, or 
 glamorous male ancestor, voyaged the high 
 thin air in one of those triangular flocks 
 sketched on the violet sky of spring, or on 
 the gray-blue heaven of autumn. 
 
 I have seen a flock of domestic geese, in 
 early spring or late autumn, rise suddenly 
 and fly around in the air, uttering wild 
 cries and exhibiting every sign of ecstatic im- 
 pulse, for wliich there appeared no sufficient 
 cause in their surroundings or condition. I 
 have not a doubt that this is an almost in- 
 voluntary movement toward migration gen- 
 erated by a feeble return of the old hereditary 
 natural desire. 
 
 The foregoing facts and instances, to which 
 might be added many more of a like charac- 
 ter, all tend to prove that birds possess some- 
 thing like hereditary memory. On the other 
 hand a few facts may be cited tending to es- 
 tablish the proposition that wild birds are 
 modifying themselves in response to the exi- 
 gencies arising out of recent changes in their 
 surroundings. 
 
 The red-headed woodpecker is rapidly be- 
 coming an expert fly -catcher, a pursuit for 
 which his physique does not especially fit 
 him, and he is already a grain and fruit-eat- 
 ing bird, although his bill and tongue are 
 made for extracting insects from rotten wood. 
 
 Chimney swallows have almost quite aban- 
 doned hollow trees for their nesting-places, 
 even in our most thickly wooded areas, pre- 
 ferring our chimneys. 
 
 The high-hole, or flicker, has become almost 
 entirely a ground bird in its feeding habit, 
 
MIND AND MEMORY OF BIRDS. 19 
 
 and is modifying its bill from the ancestral 
 wedge shape of the woodpecker's beak, to 
 that of the slender, curved mandibles belong- 
 ing to the thrushes and the meadow-lark. 
 
 The house-wren rarely builds its nest in the 
 crevices of cliffs or in the hollows of logs and 
 trees, as it once did. It seeks the habitations 
 of man and is modifying its nest architecture 
 to suit the new situation. 
 
 The sap-sucker (yellow-bellied woodpecker) 
 is losing the power to protrude its tongue far 
 beyond the end of its bill, a very striking 
 modification going on apace with its depart- 
 ure from the true woodpecker habit of feed- 
 ing. Some of the woodpecker species, the 
 hairy woodpecker, for instance, can thrust 
 forward the tongue more than two inches 
 beyond the point of the bill, while the sap- 
 sucker can reach scarcely one-third of an 
 inch. 
 
 In the case of wading birds, those species 
 which have chosen to live near small streams 
 have shorter legs and neck than species 
 which prefer larger streams, lakes or sea- 
 borders, and, taking the little green heron as 
 an example, as our streams diminish in vol- 
 ume year by year, the bird modifies its habit 
 in accordance with necessity, and in my 
 mind there is no doubt that its legs and neck 
 will be affected, in the course of a compara- 
 tively short period, to a noticeable degree. 
 
 The blue- jay is either a corvine croaker 
 passing into the song-bird's estate, or a song- 
 bird whose natural desire for singing is fading 
 away, leaving it to relapse into the crow's 
 unmusical condition; for its voice has a strain 
 of genuine melody in it mixed up, almost 
 comically, with the harsh discords of the true 
 crow-caw. 
 
20 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 It would seem that this power of self-modi- 
 fication serves the bird in the same way that 
 the inventive and constructive faculties serve 
 man. The instance of the soundless flight of 
 night-birds of prey is a striking one. A 
 hawk in swooping down upon a quail at mid- 
 day makes a loud roaring with its wings, 
 while an owl falling by night upon its quarry 
 is as silent as " snow on wool." The stillness 
 of night has operated for countless ages to 
 create a natural desire in owls for the power 
 to strike their prey in utter silence, and the 
 desire, transmitted by heredity, has finally 
 so modified the bird's wings and plumage as 
 to respond perfectly to the persistent thought. 
 
 Birds of the polar areas of snow and ice 
 are white, those of the tropics are vari-colored 
 and brilliant-hued. The condition in each 
 instance has been reached through a natural 
 desire to hide by blending with the prevailing 
 tone of Nature. Thus the quail and the par- 
 tridge, the meadow-lark and the flicker, the 
 snipes, the woodcock, the prairie grouse and, 
 in fact, nearly all the ground-feeding birds, 
 resemble one another in general color or plu- 
 mage-tone, simply because their environment 
 has induced parallelism of natural desire 
 the desire to blend with the prevailing brown 
 tinge of their feeding-places as the most 
 effective protection against the sharp eyes of 
 their enemies. Some of the game-birds have 
 even acquired the power to withhold their 
 scent from foxes and wolves, and from the 
 sportsman's dog as well. There is a good 
 reason why this desire to perfectly disappear, 
 so to speak, in the color of the environment, 
 has been more persistent and successful in 
 the case of game-birds than in that of any 
 other. On account of the sweetness of its 
 
MIND AND MEMORY OF BIRDS. 21 
 
 flesh the game-bird has a host of greedy and 
 ever-watchful enemies, and therefore its life 
 has been an intensely tragic experience from 
 its beginning down to the present time. 
 
 The aquatic birds, viewed in the light of 
 paleontology, have changed less than any 
 others in their structure and habit ; this be- 
 cause their habitat and their methods of feed- 
 ing have remained constant in a general way. 
 From the Ichthyornis and Aptornis of the 
 cretaceous shores and seas down to the terns 
 of the present time, the seas have been the 
 feeding places and the homes of this sort of 
 birds, and the food has changed little in its 
 character. Probably the marine fish-eating 
 birds are all of very ancient origin, and have 
 developed very slowly, while the kingfishers 
 and other fresh-water birds are, compara- 
 tively, of recent creation, or have been greatly 
 modified from some ancient form, because 
 the conditions and resources of fresh- water 
 bodies have always been less constant than 
 those of the salt oceans and seas. 
 
 While my sojourn at the old gin-house 
 lasted I made the herons and shore- birds and 
 the noisy songsters of the pine wood and live- 
 oak swamps my boon companions. I was not 
 in a shooting mood most of the time, prefer- 
 ring to drift about in my "boat, or to walk 
 stealthily among the wild things, watching 
 their movements and studying their attitudes 
 always with reference to the suggestions 
 contained in the foregoing notes. It is curi- 
 ous how one's imagination helps one under 
 such circumstances, by lending to every visi- 
 ble thing that coloring which never was on 
 sea or land. I soon came to regard my stately 
 herons and wide-winged pelicans as venerable 
 birds, probably older than the land upon 
 
22 SYLVAN SECEETti. 
 
 which my gin-house stood. Why should a 
 heron ever die of old age? He has no grief, 
 no sorrow, no nagging conscience, no indiges- 
 tion, no tendency towards drunkenness or 
 other vice. Look at that big ash -blue fellow 
 yonder, as he stands beside that wisp of tall 
 marsh-grass, and tell me when and where he 
 was hatched ; may it not have been ten thou- 
 sand years ago? Perhaps it was he who shed 
 the feather, the fine impression of which now 
 rests somewhere in the lowest stratum of the 
 quaternary ! Brave old fellow ! he lived before 
 the western mountains were lifted out of the 
 sea, and while yet the upper cretaceous rocks 
 were sediment held in suspension. He was 
 too wary to leave his bones beside those of 
 Hesperornis and Ichthyornisl With his 
 jewel-like eyes he has seen every step of 
 man's development. 
 
 But the mocking-bird yonder, how old is 
 he? How has he survived the great upheav- 
 als and the great down-sinkings the floods 
 and the ebbs? It is not known; but he is 
 here, nevertheless, as young and fresh and 
 free as he was when Adam drew the first 
 breath of a living soul. What migrations and 
 re-migrations he has had to make to keep on 
 land and to follow the shiftings of climate- 
 centres, during all these geologic oscillations ! 
 The time was, perhaps, when he sang in fruit- 
 fragrant groves around the North pole; for 
 that was a warm and luxuriant spot once, as 
 is shown by the vegetable fossils of the later 
 rocks. All the way from the gulf -coast north- 
 ward to where the paleozoic deposits dip un- 
 der the eternal ice and snow of the boreal re- 
 gion are found traces of a flora which grew 
 under tropical and, perhaps, even torrid con- 
 ditions of climate. The age of riant vegeta- 
 
MIND AND M&MOlir OF BIRDS. 23 
 
 tion and of summer heat was followed by the 
 gradual coming on of what is called the 
 glacial age, when vast accumulations of ice, in 
 the form of glaciers, swept down from the far 
 north and destroyed all life in America, as far 
 south at least as the Ohio River valley. Dur- 
 ing the time this enormous body of ice was 
 accumulating and moving down in the form 
 of a glacier, toward the gulf, our birds began 
 to feel a desire to move away southward be- 
 fore the chilly invader. This desire was not 
 born in a day, or a year, or a century; it 
 slowly grew by hereditary descent and accre- 
 tion, so to say, operating differently in differ- 
 ent species. Some birds by infinitesimal de- 
 grees modified their physiques to conform 
 somewhat to the exigencies of the climatic 
 changes; others, following the call of natural 
 desire, crept away in the direction of warm 
 sea-currents and genial sunshine until they 
 were huddled in some lost Atlantis, some 
 tropical garden of preservation washed by 
 tepid ocean-streams over which the glacial 
 rigor could not prevail. Then came another 
 oscillation of Nature. The tropical region 
 began to return toward the pole, drawing the 
 birds along with it, and now here they are 
 again swarming in to the land out of which 
 the ice-king drove them hundreds of centuries 
 ago! 
 
 As I swung in my hammock under the 
 grimy beams of my gin-house, listening to 
 the mocking-birds' songs and to the mellow 
 moan of the sea, I began to analyze and com- 
 pare all the foregoing facts, and it seemed to 
 me that I discovered the solution of this mys- 
 tery of bird migration which has troubled 
 naturalists so long. 
 
 During the countless centuries of the qua- 
 
24 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 ternary age there was a series of climatic 
 oscillations, the tropical temperature swaying 
 back and forth over a wide area from north 
 to south. The birds migrated to and fro un- 
 der the impulse of a natural desire to keep 
 within an agreeable habitat. These oscilla- 
 tions of temperature were on a large scale ; 
 but, from the nature of things, there were 
 intermediate disturbances of a like character, 
 and of far slighter eif ect. No doubt the birds 
 resisted these changes with stubborn persist- 
 ency, giving way before them only at the 
 last moment, and returning upon their haunts 
 with each temporary relaxation of the icy 
 grip, to be driven away again and again 
 through a long series of generations. This 
 struggle for the old northern home, kept up 
 for ages, became a hereditament of bird- 
 nature, an instinct, as we call it, a natural 
 desire, indeed, irresistible and perpetual. 
 The migratory birds are the old birds of the 
 north. With them the polar region is a dim 
 and tender memory transmitted from a re- 
 mote ancestral source. 
 
 The non-migratory species are those birds 
 whose physiques were long ago so modified 
 that natural desire for a lost habitat was ex- 
 tinguished and equilibrium reached. 
 
 The aquatic and semi-aquatic birds are 
 mostly very distant migrators, and yet, ap- 
 parently, they have the least need to migrate 
 at all. Why, for instance, should a Florida 
 gallinule leave the plashy, lily-lined margins 
 of the southern lakes in spring and go far 
 north to less eligible waters? Why do so 
 many wood duck, teal, snipe, herons and 
 bitterns come out of the South to breed? 
 The fact that many, very many, of these 
 birds do not migrate at all is strong proof, I 
 
MIND AND MEMORY OF BIRDS. 25 
 
 think, that the hereditary memory is growing 
 weaker year by year, and that the time may 
 come when migration will cease. In many 
 cases the need for migration does not exist, 
 therefore the desire is merely traditionary, as 
 it were, and must be fading out. The mock- 
 ing-bird's habit is an instance of the imperfect 
 migratory memory. Why should a few of 
 this species come as far north as the Ohio 
 valley to nest when the great body of them 
 are happy to remain far south? Such a ques- 
 tion might be asked regarding many other 
 species. The answer is to be found in trans- 
 mitted memory and hereditary desire. 
 
BESIDE THE GULF WITH &USKIN. 
 
 LET me sketch a bit of landscape before I 
 begin to write, a bit with which I have been 
 so charmed day after day that I have not 
 looked at anything else. The point of view is 
 a high swell of sand thinly set with tall, slen- 
 der pine trees, and our seat is a smooth, 
 weather-beaten log. Behind us is a dense 
 forest, stretching away for miles, a forest in 
 which the blooms and tassels are beginning 
 to show, albeit it is the second day of Feb- 
 ruary. Before us, and but 150 yards away, 
 shines the white beach and pale blue water of 
 the Gulf of Mexico. There is a sound over- 
 head, a strange moaning, made by the breeze 
 in the pine-tops, and the rhythmic sea-boom 
 seems to flow close to the ground at our feet. 
 We can see the sky in violet streaks and frag- 
 ments through the foliage, and we can catch 
 at times glimpses of stately ships standing far 
 out along the horizon, apparently motionless, 
 but in reality bowling along before a good 
 breeze "from lands of snow to lands of sun." 
 The temperature of the air is such that we 
 need no wraps, and yet are not too warm, 
 and there is a June-like balm felt with every 
 breath we draw. Here is where my friend 
 and I come to lounge to " loaf and invite our 
 souls." We have been reading Euskin, too, 
 or rather my friend has been reading aloud 
 to me, while I have lain in a most receptive 
 mood, watching the ever fresh color-changes 
 of the landscape. Ruskin describes clouds, 
 2G 
 
WITH RUSKIN. W 
 
 but how could he ever find a phrase with 
 which to picture a gulf -cap, as I see it yonder 
 in the far south-west, suspended between sea 
 and sky? The fact is that here on the gulf 
 coast I find some of the most delightful 
 weather and many of the most charming bits 
 of scenery I have ever enjoyed. One could 
 almost afford to have a sharp attack of in- 
 flammatory rheumatism in order to get sent 
 down here (for a month or two 0f convales- 
 cence) where one may lie on a log like an alli- 
 gator and listen to the wind and the sea and 
 the roaring pines, while an obliging friend 
 sits buzzing and humming over a volume of 
 Ruskin like a bee over a flower. Few books 
 will bear reading in the open air, in the full, 
 strong light of nature. Even Ruskin would 
 suffer under the test. 
 
 How apparent becomes the utter isolation 
 of a mind like Ruskin's when one gets thor- 
 oughly apart with it and at a great distance 
 from the clashing activities of worldly life ! 
 Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin -three lonely 
 spirits talking to mankind in the language of 
 seers and prophets, and all without much re- 
 sult, so far as effecting their purposes is con- 
 cerned. This is good mind-food, all this bril- 
 liant literature, suggestive, thought-provok- 
 ing, soul-delighting; but the old world and 
 the new world heed not its philosophy, flinch 
 not under its goads, adopt not one suggestion 
 it offers. A few read and are strangely af- 
 fected; they feel a fertilizing element flung 
 into their minds, and they wonder why all 
 the world is not down at Carlyle's, or Emer- 
 son's, or Ruskin's feet; and yet even these 
 few do not go much farther than mere recep- 
 tivity impels. The activities of life are, in- 
 deed, little influenced by the great abstract 
 
28 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 thinkers. This world is a material one, and, 
 hate materialism as we justly may. it is af- 
 fected most by material forces. One sees this 
 more plainly when one is at a distance from 
 the world, shut up, so to speak, in the heart 
 of nature, where one may be secure in peep- 
 ing forth to watch 
 
 With an eye serene 
 
 The very pulse of the machine. 
 
 Hence, reading Buskin in the open air of the 
 pine woods, with the blue gulf of Mexico pur- 
 ring at your feet, is quite different from perus- 
 ing him in a closely-curtained and overheated 
 library. While my friend was reading yes- 
 terday, in the mellowest tones ipiaginable, 
 and while I was watching a steamer trail a 
 dim line of smoke along the wavering hori- 
 zon, lo! the first mocking-bird song of the 
 season came rippling forth from a neighbor- 
 ing thicket of wax-myrtle bushes. You know 
 these myrtles bear thick bunches of fragrant, 
 oily berries, from which the people of this re- 
 gion formerly made wax for candles used by 
 Catholics in certain church and funeral for- 
 malities. We forgot Ruskin in giving our 
 ears over to this fresh music bubbling from 
 the well-spring of nature. Think of it, a gen- 
 uine gush of bird-song on the second day of 
 February! And such a song, too! bright, 
 airiose, full of spirit, and yet rich and deep^ 
 almost too melancholy at times, running 
 through a hundred changes in as many sec- 
 onds, and filling the whole wood with mel- 
 ody. It is very unusual for a mocking-bird 
 to sing so early as this, but the weather has 
 been superb, and already the violets are bloom- 
 ing blue and white all through the forests 
 along this coast. My friend threw aside the 
 
WITH RUSKIN. 29 
 
 volume of Ruskin and went slipping away 
 toward the thicket in a vain attempt to sur- 
 prise the singer at his song. Here is fame! 
 The greatest of living art critics is forgotten 
 in the presence of American song-birds ! For 
 one I am patriotic enough to be proud of the 
 bird's superiority. Whatever is good and at 
 the same time genuinely American, is worth 
 honoring, if it is nothing but a song of free- 
 dom sung out of season by a free wild bird. 
 But the mocking-bird is far more typical of 
 America than is the eagle, for it is found only 
 in our country, and then its restless and en- 
 terprising disposition is the very counterpart 
 of that which has placed our nation in the 
 fore-front of progress within so short a period 
 of time. It is interesting to go back through 
 the writings of the naturalists and note how 
 they all have done homage to the mocking- 
 bird, le moqueur as Buffon called it. Fer- 
 nandes, Nieremberg, Catesby, Bartram, Wil- 
 son, Audubon, Nuttall, Baird, and Cones have 
 built monuments of praise to it, poets have 
 sung to it, musicians have tried to imitate it, 
 and everybody has admired it. No wonder 
 then if its song drove Ruskin from our minds. 
 The digression was short, however, for, like 
 every other true genius, the mocking-bird is 
 not overgenerous with song-giving, and al- 
 ways quits before he has quite satisfied you. 
 
 My reading friend began where he had left 
 oil: with a passage like this: "The guilty 
 thieves of Europe, the real sources of deadly 
 war in it, are the capitalists. " From a man 
 who was born a capitalist and who has never 
 known the need of a dollar, that is a strange 
 assertion, but if any rich man has or ever had 
 the right to make it John Raskin is he. A 
 capitalist who gives $50,000 per annum to the 
 
30 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 poor is quite entitled to air his opinions touch- 
 ing the doings of his own tribe of men, and 
 we are bound to give his opinions consider- 
 able weight. But when one is in the woods 
 and as free as the breeze one is apt to smile at 
 any mere opinion. At this distance men ap- 
 pear to be divided into two classes, viz. : cap- 
 italists and those who would very much like 
 to be capitalists. The capitalists are glad 
 they are capitalists, and the others are angry 
 because they are not capitalists. I say that 
 thus it looks to a free man far down in the 
 Southern woods, no matter what Ruskin or 
 the anarchists may say. It is curious to note 
 how surely every argument against the nat- 
 ural processes of human intercourse and gov- 
 ernment tends toward anarchy. Worldly 
 wisdom long ago constructed, by a process 
 cf crystallization, the only true economy 
 namely, that controlled by the principle of 
 make and keep. The laborer is worthy of his 
 hire and he must have it, but he must save 
 a part of it if he would become independent. 
 v .This is all that can be said from now till 
 
 o- v * s * i doomsday. The laborer is the only free man. 
 
 <; +**' So soon as he ceases to be a laborer he is no 
 longer free, and so the danger to organized 
 laborers bound in a body is the loss of per- 
 sonal liberty in the loss of the right to labor 
 at will. 
 
 But we must not let Ruskin lead us into the 
 labor question ; for how can we think clearly 
 on such a subject here in this dim wood, with 
 the lazy, balmy breeze fanning us, and the 
 gulf waves murmuring at our feet? Give us 
 a vision of the stones of Venice, O large- 
 hearted but impractical Ruskin! or lead us 
 over to Rome, or to Verona in a trance, but 
 do not mention political or domestic economy 
 
WITH RUSKIN. 31 
 
 again, for we are idlers and health-hunters, 
 lounging along the gulf shore and reading for 
 pleasure, not for profit. 
 
 Indeed, one must read for pleasure when 
 one would thoroughly enjoy Buskin, and then 
 what a charming outdoor companion he is. 
 His theories and quirks and carpings all dis- 
 appear in his brilliant phrasing and musical 
 cadences. Color, color, color, harmony, finely- 
 sketched outlines, impressions set against the 
 most witching backgrounds, and above all a 
 rare sincerity ever present, and saturating 
 the whole like the juice in ripe fruit, or like 
 the sunshine in summer air. One must mix 
 one's figures in attempting to characterize 
 Buskin's style, for it is as changeable and 
 curious as the inside of a kaleidoscope. He 
 sees things from an isolated and exceptional 
 point of view, but he is never purposely ec- 
 centric or odd in his ways of expression. He 
 is original, and, more, he is always strikingly 
 picturesque, so that when you read his works 
 in the open air, or hear them read there, it is 
 almost as if his figures and thoughts stood out 
 upon the landscape against the sky or the sea, 
 for above all he is an artist of the best sort 
 and harmonizes his creations with the great 
 scheme of nature. He believes that he is a 
 realist of the pre-Baphaelite kind, but he is, 
 nevertheless, a romancer, a thorough-going 
 idealist, always glorifying and beautifying 
 something common and vulgar till it shines 
 like a sunlit cloud. Indeed, even nature is 
 not a realist of the analytical, microscopic 
 sort in her best work, for she is not content 
 with showing things just as they are, but 
 must hang a luminous atmosphere about them 
 and touch them with heavenly colors. She 
 knows the blue enchantment of distance, the 
 
32 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 value of romantic suggestions, the power of 
 dim lines and mysterious shadows. She 
 sketches here, she indicates an effect yonder, 
 at one moment finishing the minutest details, 
 at another dashing a formless wonder on sky, 
 or sea, or mountain side, but she never stops 
 work to analyze motives or to call attention 
 to her methods. 
 
 "Not with the skill of an hour, nor of a 
 life," reads my friend, " nor of a century, but 
 with the help of numberless souls, a beautiful 
 thing must be done." Ah, Mr. Ruskin, you 
 are right. By such a plan all creation has 
 been wrought. Nature knows it. With the 
 help of numberless energies the seed germi- 
 nates, the plant grows, the leaves leap forth, 
 and the flower flashes like a sun. What eons 
 of years it has taken to build a rose up from 
 the almost formless plant sketch set in the 
 ancient rocks ! What a slow process has been 
 the building of the present man up from the 
 man of the cave and the peat-bog ! Nature is 
 never in a hurry save when in a destructive 
 mood. She broods over her working plans 
 and saturates her materials with life from a 
 myriad sources before her dream begins to 
 take material form. Ruskin disputes himself, 
 however, and repudiates this doctrine pres- 
 ently, for he affects to despise the practical 
 part of paleontology and archeology, and to 
 laugh at the scientists in general. Perhaps 
 he is in accord with nature here, too, for she 
 disputes herself and denies her acts, whenever 
 it can serve her turn, to say nothing of the 
 way she snubs the scientists. " Does not Mr. 
 Darwin show you that you can't wash the 
 slugs out of a lettuce without disrespect to 
 your ancestors? " reads my friend, and I see 
 a smile of deep satisfaction on his refined 
 
WITH BUSKIN. 33 
 
 face, for he cannot endure evolution. But it 
 occurs to me that the choice between a slug 
 on one hand and a hideous cannibal on the 
 other gives one no great aesthetic latitude in 
 selecting a forefather. It is not what we 
 have risen from that should make us blush, 
 but what we are now. Our progeny, not our 
 ancestors, should make us glad or sad. All 
 the more honor to the man if indeed he has 
 come up from the germ in the old dust of 
 chaos, has wriggled past the worms, swam 
 past the fishes, outstripped the birds, and 
 made himself the lord, of all the animals. In- 
 deed, as I sit here in this tropical springtide, 
 with my eyes full of color-visions and my 
 ears full of soothing sounds, I am willing to 
 consider myself a manifestation of nature's 
 patient work, the end of a labor begun when 
 life first stirred in the most favored spot of 
 the earth. 
 
 The trouble with Ruskin is that he has come 
 to look upon art as the whole of life. He 
 would make the world a great studio he 
 would change human passion into a figure to 
 be drawn on canvas and cut in marble. Hear 
 my friend read again : 
 
 "Do you fancy a Greek workman ever 
 made a vase by measurement? He dashed it 
 from his hand on the wheel, and it was beau- 
 tiful ; and a Venetian glass-blower swept you 
 a curve of crystal from the end of his pipe ; 
 and Reynolds or Tintoretto swept a curve of 
 color from their pencils, as a musician the ca- 
 dence of a note, unerring and to be measured, 
 if you please, afterward, with the exactitude 
 of divine law." 
 
 This is a fine sketch of true genius; but I 
 look at the slender, shining wake on the water 
 yonder, where a wild duck has been swim- 
 3 
 
34 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 ming, and I note the same freedom of curve, 
 the same unconscious sweep along the line of 
 beauty which has immortalized the painter, 
 the glass-blower, and the carver. And hark ! 
 the mocking-bird again a gush of artless mel- 
 ody rippling away through the slumberous 
 wood sweet as the flute-notes of Marsyas or 
 the lyre-chords of Apollo. 
 
 I do not hear half of what my friend reads, 
 for how can I listen to sea and wind and pine 
 moan and bird song and Euskiii all at once. 
 I watch the fishing-smack out yonder, beat- 
 ing in against the breeze. Now the mainsail 
 is white against the sky ; anon it is black as 
 ink ; again it is gray touched with brown. I 
 used to see pictures of ships with gloomy sails 
 blotching an almost indigo sky, and I thought 
 the pictures in bad color. Now I feel how 
 true they were. Even Euskin might make 
 the same mistake in a criticism. This for in- 
 stance : 
 
 Both Raphael and Rembrandt are masters, 
 indeed ; but neither of them masters of light 
 and shade, in treatment of which the first is 
 always false, the second always vulgar. The 
 only absolute masters of light and shade are 
 those who never make you think of light and 
 shade more than nature herself does. 
 
 But I find that nature makes me think of 
 light and shade all the time. Indeed, I see 
 nothing else in nature so emphasized here, so 
 accentuated there, so graded, so obtruded, so 
 dashed about and experimented with, so in- 
 sisted upon at every turn, as light and shade, 
 and he must be a vigorous brushman, cer- 
 tainly, who can get into a picture more light 
 and shade than nature habitually uses on hey 
 smallest canvas. Even now the sails of the 
 smack are shining like a flake of moonshine 
 
WITH BUSKIN. 35 
 
 against the dark magnolias of a low shore 
 line, as it glides into the little harbor. 
 
 After all even Buskin, is hard to read in the 
 " lap of nature." Give me something lighter, 
 a volume of Keats or Wordsworth; or no, 
 give me nothing by nobody ; let me lie in this 
 balmy spot and dream and see visions and be 
 free from the cunning of genius and the tricks 
 of talent. 
 
CERYLE ALCYON. 
 
 THE kingfisher is a dash of bright blue in 
 every choice bit of brookside poetry or paint- 
 ing; he is a warm fragment of tropical life 
 and color, left over from the largess be- 
 stowed upon our frigid world by one of those 
 fervid periods of ancient creative force so 
 dear to the imagination, and so vaguely 
 limned on the pages of science. The bird, 
 by some fine law, keeps its artistic value fully 
 developed. You never see Alcyon out of 
 keeping with the environment; even when 
 going into the little dark hole in the earth, 
 where its nest is hidden, the flash of tur- 
 quoise light with which it disappears leaves a 
 sheen on the observer's memory as fascinat- 
 ing and evasive as some fleeting poetical al- 
 lusion. 
 
 Ceryle Alcyon I how sweet the name in the 
 midst of those jarring sounds invented by sci- 
 ence. Coming upon it in the catalogues is 
 like hearing a cultured voice in the midst of 
 a miner's broil, or like meeting a beautiful 
 child in a cabinet of fossils. Ceryle Alcyon 
 suggests sunshine, bright water, dreamy 
 skies, and that rich foliage growing near 
 streams a foliage to which the adjective 
 lush clings like some rather ornamental cater- 
 pillar, with an underhint of classical affinity 
 very tenuous and filmy. It is a disappoint- 
 ment to one's imagination at first to find out 
 that so beautiful a creature as the A Icyon can- 
 not sing ; but there is just compensation in 
 36 
 
CERYLE ALCYON. 37 
 
 the knowledge which soon comes, that in- 
 strumental music is the bird's forte he plays 
 on the water as on a dulcimer, bringing out 
 pure liquid notes (at long intervals, indeed) 
 too sweet and elusive to be fixed in any 
 written score. To watch Ceryle Alcyon 
 strike the silver strings of a summer brook 
 and set them to vibrating is worth the sacri- 
 fice of any leisure hour. It is the old touch 
 of Apollo, swift, sure, masterful, virile, and 
 yet tender as the very heart of nature. 
 ' ' Plash ! " A sudden gleam of silver, 
 amethyst, and royal purple, a whorl as of a 
 liquid bloom on the water, rings and dim- 
 ples and bubbles, and in the midst of it all, 
 the indescribable sound from the smitten 
 stream, its one chord rendered to perfection. 
 Nature sketched the kingfisher, in the first 
 place, with a certain humorous expression, 
 which still lurks in the overlarge crest and al- 
 most absurdly short legs ; but the bird itself is 
 always in earnest. It may look at times like 
 a bright, sharp exclamation point at the close 
 of some comic passage in the phenakism of 
 nature, but it is the very embodiment of 
 sincerity; in fact, the birds are all realists 
 of the prosiest kind. One might as well look 
 for something large and morally lifting in 
 a minutely analytical novel, as to expect a 
 bird to be sentimental. A worm in the case 
 of the kingfisher a minnow is the highest 
 object of avian ambition the realist dotes on 
 one's motive in twisting one's thumbs and or- 
 nithic life does not generate poetry. The 
 kingfisher knows his brook from source to 
 mouth, for he has conned it during countless 
 ages. Not that he has lived so long individ- 
 ually, the knowledge exists in heredity the 
 transmitted sum of ten thousand ancestral 
 
38 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 lives devoted to the one end, analysis of the 
 brook, minute observation of the minnow's 
 tricksy ways, the time to strike, in a word, 
 how to get a living on the wing. He has 
 gazed into the wavering shadowy water so 
 long that he has become habitually given to 
 a see-saw motion suggestive of vertigo in a 
 harmless form. I have lain on a favored 
 spot and looked, with half -closed eyes, far 
 down the sheeny course of a rivulet at the 
 flight of this happy knight of the fish-spear 
 as he came toward me, and I am sure there 
 is joine obscure correlation between the 
 motion of his sky-mailed wings and that of 
 the flowing water. 
 
 Evolution tinges everything. One grows 
 like what one contemplates, and Alcyon may 
 well be said to have grown, through ages of 
 transmitted and accumulating contemplation, 
 like the swaying and lapsing water he was 
 created to love. But his voice is the very 
 irony of mirth, a derisive and soulless chuckle, 
 sounding like one long, rasping note broken 
 up into a score of rusty fragments and shaken 
 through a sieve; indeed, his vocal organs, 
 including his tongue, are rudimentary, shut- 
 ting away the possibility of song. Wilson 
 likens the cry to the sound of a watchman's 
 rattle, but it has an expression of its own, in 
 consonance with that of the babbling waves 
 and rustling acquatic plants. Stripped of its 
 entourage, it closely resembles the chattering, 
 rarer cry of the tree-frog. 
 
 Our belted Alcyon is an expert flyer, 
 balancing himself adroitly in the air above a 
 pool or rapid, until he fixes the precise lurk- 
 ing-place of his prey, then swooping down 
 with almost electrical quickness into the water 
 to strike it. When in level flight the bird 
 
CERYLE ALCYON. 39 
 
 has a peculiarly flattened appearance for one 
 of its bulk, which gives its big head and 
 long, thick bill accentuated prominence 
 verging on the ludicrous in effect. At rest 
 it appears to sit unnecessarily close to its 
 feet, so to speak, its short legs being much 
 bent, as if in readiness for a leap into the air. 
 Therefore, for obvious reasons, the kingfisher 
 has been the despair of artists, luring them 
 with incomparable colors and repelling them 
 with absurdly unmanageable attitudes and 
 outlines. The poet even must falter at the 
 mouth of he bird's dismal subterraneous 
 den, wherein are stored the beautiful white 
 eggs. This semi-reptilian nest habit, not 
 much better than that of the land turtle, is 
 singularly out of keeping with the beautiful 
 cleanliness of the kingfisher's aerial and 
 aquatic life. So nice, indeed, is he, for the 
 most part, that water will not wet him when 
 he plunges into it, and he even comes out of his 
 dank, musty burrow without a touch of dirt 
 011 his resplendent feathers. 
 
 The family (Alcedinidce) to which Ceryle 
 Alcyon belongs, consists of nineteen genera 
 and over a hundred species, but the fish- 
 eating members are the only burrowers, 
 probably, while the insect-eating and reptile- 
 catching ones nest, as a rule, in the hollows 
 of trees. We have but one genus (Ceryle) 
 and two species in the United States, the 
 second species being the Texas green king- 
 fisher (Ceryle Americana cabanisi). Alcyon 
 ranges as far north as Michigan, even much 
 farther, oscillating back and forth with that 
 weather temperature which keeps the small 
 streams free of ice. Leaving Michigan in 
 early autumn, where I saw Alcyon on the 
 northernmost point of the Leelenaw penin- 
 
40 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 sula, I reached St. Augustine, Florida, in the 
 first week in November, finding the bird on 
 all the streams that I examined between the 
 two points. 
 
 It has always struck me as most singular 
 that minks, weasels, and snakes do not ex- 
 terminate Ceryle Alcyon on account of the 
 burrowing habit. Many of the nest-burrows 
 that I have explored have been quite large 
 enough for an averaged-sized mink to enter, 
 and the least of them would have been 
 traversed easily by a weasel, to say nothing 
 of snakes. Of course, in the incubating sea- 
 son the bird might guard the nest; but it 
 would seem that the young must be terribly 
 exposed ; still not more so, perhaps, than those 
 of the whippoorwill. 
 
 The burrow is usually in the clayey bank or 
 bluff of a stream, entering almost horizontally 
 to a distance of from two to ten feet ; but I 
 found one that descended vertically two feet 
 and then turned at about right-angles. This 
 was near the edge of a brook bluff in Middle 
 Indiana. 
 
 Drawing upon my notes and my recollec- 
 tions of Ceryle Alcyon, I see again the hun- 
 dreds of trout-brooks and bass-streams I 
 have whipped from the Manistee to the Kissi- 
 mee, and all the little rivers I have voyaged 
 upon from the Boardman to Pearl River, but 
 the one stream that I remember as fairly 
 haunted with this bird is the Salliquoy, a 
 strong rivulet in the hill-country of Cherokee, 
 Georgia. In a half rotten tulip pirogue I 
 made a slow voyage down this stream during 
 the last of April and the first of May, a sea- 
 son when the leaves and flowers of that wild, 
 strange region are at the fullest stage of their 
 development. I started far up among the 
 
CERYLE ALCYON. 41 
 
 little mountain billows that break around the 
 north-eastern rim of Dry Valley and worked 
 down to the beautiful and deep Coosawattee. 
 It appears to my memory now that nearly 
 every bough that swung over the water bore 
 its belted kingfisher, while the sound of their 
 diving in the shallows was almost continuous. 
 I dare say distance has trebled the number of 
 birds and exaggerated their activity, but no- 
 where else have I spent so happy a fortnight 
 with Alcyon. I remember that my compan- 
 ion remarked, with perfect youthful sincer- 
 ity, that it was a comfort to realize the ina- 
 bility of the kingfishers to catch the two- 
 pound bass we were angling for. This same 
 companion, standing in the stern of our 
 pirogue, balancing himself like the born ca- 
 noeist that he was, and playing one of those 
 gamey mountain bass, was as picturesque a 
 figure as ever delighted an artist or empha- 
 sized a landscape. He was the prince of 
 archers, too, and many a whistling shaft he 
 sped at the wild things in the air and on the 
 banks. So intense was his sportman's delight 
 in every phase of outdoor excitement that it 
 was almost painful to witness his ecstasy of 
 hesitation when one fine morning, just as he 
 had hooked a large fighting bass, which was de- 
 termined to break out of the water, he saw an 
 ibis, a rare stranger in that region, standing 
 not more than forty yards from him. His 
 bow and arrows lay at his feet, the bass was 
 demanding the strictest attention, a word 
 would scare the bird away ! I forbear to fill in 
 the sketch. The reader may finish it to suit 
 himself. 
 
 But to get back to Ceryle Alcyon and its 
 ways. It is probable that Haley ornis toliapi- 
 cus, a fossil of the eocene, may have some re- 
 
42 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 mote relationship to our bird, but the testi- 
 mony of this does not amount to evidence. 
 We must take Alcyon as he is, without any 
 genealogical table or ancient armorial relics. 
 He is not an aristocrat, if the index of aris- 
 tocracy is a well-formed foot, for, like all his 
 /amily, he has but three good toes, and they 
 are as rough and ugly as warts. Compared 
 with those of the mocking-bird, indeed, his 
 feet appear scarcely more than rudimentary 
 (about on a par with his vocal organs, advanc- 
 ing the comparison so as to weigh his rattling 
 laugh with the ecstatic song of Mimuspolyg- 
 lottus), still he perches very firmly and, after 
 a fashion, gracefully. His descent upon a 
 minnow is a miracle of motion, accompanied 
 by a surpassing feat of vision. We will 
 imagine him seated on a bough thirty feet 
 above the brook- stream. The sunshine comes 
 down in flakes like burning snow upon the 
 twinkling, palpitating water, making the 
 surface flicker and glimmer in a way to dis- 
 tract any eye. Down in this water is the 
 minnow which Alcyon is to catch and swal- 
 low, a minnow whose sides are silver just 
 touched with gold, flitting and flashing here 
 and there, never still, flippant as the wavelets 
 themselves. Mark the bird's attitude and ex- 
 pression as they blend into a sort of serio- 
 comic enigma crest erect and bristling, eyes 
 set and burning, bill elevated at a slight 
 angle, tail depressed, wings shut close, 
 the whole figure motionless. Suddenly he 
 falls like a thought, a sky-blue film marking 
 the line of descent to where he strikes. He 
 pierces the pool like an arrow, disappearing 
 for a second in the centre of a great whirling, 
 leaping bubbling dimple of the water, with a 
 musical plunge-note once heard never forgot- 
 
CERYLE ALCYON. 43 
 
 ten. Barely does he miss his aim. If your 
 eyes are quick you will see the hapless ' ' silver 
 side " feebly wriggling in the grip of that 
 powerful bill as Ceryle Alcyon emerges from 
 the dancing waves and resumes his perch, 
 happier, but none the wetter, on account of 
 the bath. Now the wonder of this vision-feat 
 is not in seeing the minnow from the perch, 
 but in continuing to see it during that arrow- 
 like descent into the water ; or, if you choose 
 to refer the success of the stroke to accuracy 
 of flight, then try to understand what 
 amazing accuracy it is ! .For, in that case, 
 Alcyon must take into exact account the dif- 
 ference between the apparent and the true 
 position of an object in the water as viewed 
 at an angle from without. 
 
 The negroes of North Georgia liad caught 
 from the Cherokee Indians the art of making 
 the blow-gun, and I found one old slave who 
 firmly believed that a blow-gun arrow, pointed 
 with the lower mandible of the kingfisher, 
 was the only one with which the bird could 
 be killed. This fanciful conceit may be added 
 to the long catalogue of superstitions which 
 cling to the history of Alcyon. My archer 
 companion of the Salliquoy had the upper 
 band of his quiver decorated with a king- 
 fisher's head, to signify that his arrows 
 would fly straight to the living target. And 
 the badge was not an idle boast, for he stood 
 in my canoe and killed a green heron, stop- 
 ping it in mid flight with a pewter-headed 
 shaft from a mulberry bow. 
 
 Ceryle Alcyon digs its own burrow, which 
 it may be said to do on the wing, so rapid are 
 the motions connected with the performance. 
 The beginning of the excavation is made with 
 the bill, while the bird balances on its wings 
 
44 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 close to the face of the ?lay bluff into which 
 it means to project its adit. There is a fine 
 suggestion of blended royalty and democratic 
 self-dependence in the apparition of this 
 splendid creature turning itself into a richly 
 jeweled tunnelling-machine or drifting appa- 
 ratus, hurling itself beak foremost into the 
 earth. 
 
 Day by day the digging goes on, the male 
 and female both laboring, I am led to believe, 
 until the mine is completed, a mine, by the 
 way, admirably constructed for self -drainage, 
 but scarcely ventilated at all ; a grimy, dark, 
 filthy den at best, and often unspeakably 
 loathsome. No wonder Alcyon laughs as 
 soon as he emerges from such a cavern into 
 the sweet light and air of a May morning ! 
 No wonder, either, that the laugh has in it a 
 strong touch of reptilian indifference to vocal 
 harmony! Here is the best instance, speak- 
 ing without any reference to comparative an- 
 atomy, of a bird still attached to the lower 
 life of its archetype, the life of a burrowing, 
 grovelling, repellant amphibian, but enjoying 
 also, to the full, the broad liberty, the sweet 
 luxury, the inexpressible delight of avian 
 pursuits by flood and field. 
 
 What would our noisy mill-streams and 
 bass-rivulets be without Ceryle Alcyonl As 
 for me, I should find a prime aesthetic value 
 gone from angling, were the kingfisher with- 
 drawn from brookside nature. His laugh 
 may come in now and then just in time to 
 taunt one over a piscatorial disaster, and 
 hence be very ire-provoking, but, as a rule, I 
 have found it a rather refreshing giggle of 
 delight over the landing of an unusually 
 game fish. 
 
 "Pid-d-d d-d-d!" sang out Ceryle Alcyon 
 
CEEYLE ALCYON. 45 
 
 one morning on the Salliquoy, just as the ar- 
 cher saw a three-pound bass he was playing 
 leap out of the water and shake itself free of 
 the hook. ' ' Pid-d-d-d-d-d ! " It was the most 
 inopportune jeer imaginable to the ear of the 
 baffled angler. Down went the rod along 
 with some classical allusion to hades, and up 
 came the bow and arrow from the bottom of 
 the pirogue. The archer had a most becom- 
 ing phrensy in his visage as he poised him- 
 self and drew the arrow almost into the bow. 
 
 Alcyon sat on a dogwood branch, amid the 
 clusters of great white flowers, distant sixty 
 yards from the bowman. 
 
 There was a tragic pause for the aim, a 
 knotting of the muscles on the straining 
 arms, then the recoil of the bow, the low sibi- 
 lation of the missile. I watched with atten- 
 tive eyes, throughout the flat trafectory, the 
 flight of the feathered shaft. 
 
 "Take that, you snickering idiot!" ex- 
 claimed the irate archer, just as he thought 
 the arrow would strike. 
 
 4 'Pid-d-d-d-d-d!" retorted A Icyon, taking 
 to wing just in time to give his space to the 
 shaft, and away he went down the winding 
 course of the stream until he was lost in the 
 gloom and sheen of distance. A spray of 
 dogwood blooms, severed by the shot, fell up- 
 on the water, and then the " tchick " of the 
 arrow-head, striking among the pebbles of a 
 shallow "riffle" far down the stream, came 
 back like an echo of the bird's final note, to 
 make the archer's defeat most emphatic. 
 
 The semi-comical grotesquerie of the king- 
 fisher's ways is exemplified in his attitude 
 while suspending himself in the air above the 
 water by a peculiar alar motion, when his 
 head is thrust forward and downward to the 
 
46 SYLVAAf SECRETS. 
 
 full extent of his somewhat constricted neck, 
 with the crest erected so that each feather 
 stands to itself, and the short tail spread like 
 a fan. When, after a season of rain, the 
 streams are not clear, Alcyon hovers in this 
 way close to the water's surface, and plunges 
 upon his prey from on the wing, after the 
 manner of the prairie hawk. 
 
 A gentleman in Alabama told me that 
 while trolling with a float and silver min- 
 now in one of the bass-streams of the Sand- 
 mountain region, he actually hooked and 
 caught a kingfisher which struck at the bait. 
 The incident, though unusual, is not wonder- 
 ful, and might happen at any time when the 
 troller should have out enough line to relieve 
 the bird of fear. 
 
 The swallowing capacity of Alcyon is enor- 
 mous; he makes nothing of taking down a 
 stout minnow of three inches in length, an 
 operation nearly always followed by a rasp- 
 ing snicker of gustatory delight and a wrig- 
 gle equally expressive. Upon such an occa- 
 sion he looks down upon the stream w^hich 
 has furnished him the delicious morsel with 
 a glare of supercilious ingratitude in his half- 
 fishy, half-beautiful eyes, as if he never 
 should ask another favor or want another 
 fish. 
 
 Near an old mill, in which I had my quar- 
 ters for a bream-season, two kingfishers had 
 their burrow, the entrance being just above 
 the longitudinal timbers of the race-way. I 
 used to sit on the cap of the fore-bay with the 
 big water-wheel jarring and groaning under 
 me, and cast my lure into the stream far be- 
 low. From this same perch I could watch 
 and study the busy Alcyons as they speared 
 Hhs minnows an.d, bore them into the burrow 
 
CEEYLE ALCYON. 47 
 
 to their young. The miller told me that for 
 years the pair had nested in the same place, 
 and he would not permit me to explore it. 
 He went on to detail a number of reminis- 
 cences in which the birds figured picturesque- 
 ly; one I remember was to the effect that 
 a hawk had pursued the male kingfisher so 
 savagely, once upon a time, that the poor 
 fugitive had rushed into the mill and hidden 
 itself in the hollow of a grain-shaft. This 
 love of the miller for his birds struck me as 
 beautifully romantic, especially as the mill 
 was in a remote mountain " pocket" where 
 any thing to love was as hard to find as were 
 the deer in the pine thickets on the stony 
 foot-hills, and considering the fact that he 
 was an old sinner as tough in his fiber as the 
 oaken beams of his race-way. 
 
 The kingfisher has inspired the genius of 
 poets, legend-makers, superstition -mongers, 
 and scientists all the way from Ovid down to 
 Mr. R. B. Sharpe of our own day, who has 
 published a brilliant and wonderful mono- 
 graph of the Alcedinidce, with many excel- 
 lent figures. M. Holland in his " Faune Pap- 
 ulaire da la France " relates a legend to the 
 effect that Alcyon, in leaving the ark, flew 
 straight toward the setting sun, and that his 
 back caught its blue from the sky above, and 
 his breast was scorched by the luminary be- 
 low to a brownish, clouded hue. Its head is 
 worn as a charm by savages and was conspic- 
 uous on a fetich string I saw in the possession 
 of a negro conjurer. Its dried body was once 
 thought able to ward off lightning and to in- 
 dicate the direction of the wind. But, no 
 matter what may be true of the European 
 and other foreign kingfishers, our Ceryle 
 Akyon is not gifted with any supra-aviqn 
 
48 SYLVAN SECEETS. 
 
 powers, and outside of his dismal den is a 
 bonnie blue sprite of the water-ways, living 
 a bright and happy life forever, perhaps ; for 
 I never have found a sick, a decrepit, or a 
 dead one, nor have I ever heard of any body 
 who could testify that any of our wild birds 
 ever die of true disease or of old age. 
 
 The most beautiful kingfisher superstition 
 or legend I ever have known of was told to 
 me by an old negro in Georgia. How far it 
 extended among the Southern slaves I have 
 no means of knowing. Here it is : 
 
 " When you is a leetle boy, not mo' 'n six 
 year old, ef yo' go to de ribber an' see de 
 minner at sunrise fo' de kingfisher do, den 
 yo' neUber die 'ceptin' yo' git dro wnded ; an 
 den ef yo' does git drownded, de kingfisher 
 tote yo' sperit right off ter hebben, 'ca'se der's 
 no use 'r talkiii' 'bout habin' any bad luck ef 
 yo' got de eye like de ole kingfisher." 
 
 I say the superstition is very beautiful, but 
 in effect it is the same old story of the heavy 
 chances against the seeker after lasting hap- 
 piness, for how much harder is it for a camel 
 to amble through the eye of a needle than for 
 any living being to see a minnow, in the 
 water quicker than can the incomparable 
 eyes of the Ceryle Alcyont 
 
SWAMP SKETCHES. 
 
 A SOUTHERN swamp is to me a very fasci- 
 nating place, a genuine land of dreams. In 
 a realistic sense it is mere mud, water, tus- 
 socks, gloom, tangled vines, and dusky tree- 
 masses ; but there is that in those dim, damp, 
 luxuriant jungles which appeals to all that 
 is romantic in one's nature. It was my fort- 
 une once to pitch my tent on a ridge of sand 
 lying between the waters of the Gulf of 
 Mexico and the mazes of a swamp whose 
 almost impenetrable woods and brakes stood 
 like a black wall by night and like a sheeny 
 screen by day set against a sky as tender as 
 the petals of a hyacinth. No sign of human 
 life was near, not even a fisherman's hut. 
 
 The beach of my sand bar was the most 
 perfect I ever saw white, hard, and gently 
 sloping out to sea, where the greenish waves 
 ran through dreamy sunshine to the far 
 white line of the horizon. A week of south- 
 easterly winds brought up from the Carib- 
 bean islands a soft fragrance and balm, and 
 kept the water in brisk motion, so that it 
 lapped the sand with a melodious roar, and 
 so that a dancing zigzag line of silvery spray 
 marked the surf margin as far as one could 
 see. 
 
 In the south-west a long crescent of marsh 
 
 ran from the swamp to the sand. There all 
 
 manner of sea birds congregated at times 
 
 with a shimmer of wings and a clash of 
 
 4 49 
 
50 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 voices that touched the imagination strangely 
 enough. 
 
 My boatmen, both of whom were Creoles, 
 so-called, could not imagine why I should 
 have taken such a considerable voyage 
 merely to stay a few days on a sand-bank 
 reading books under a tent-fly, or to make 
 journeys into a dismal and lonely swamp, 
 neither of which would have afforded them 
 any pleasure whatever. They evidently 
 deemed my motives obscure and mysterious, 
 if not wholly unchristian. 
 
 I chose this particular place more by acci- 
 dent than otherwise, but it proved to be the 
 best for my purposes that I could possibly 
 have found. The sand ridge ran for a long 
 way back into the swamp, and thus gave me 
 a safe and easy road to the heart of a typical 
 jungle. 
 
 The outer fringe of the swamp growth was 
 si line of marsh grass growing about waist- 
 high and of a dusky olive-green in color. 
 Next came a dense growth of cane with scat- 
 tering clusters of bay trees, then a hummock 
 of live-oaks, beyond which, lonely, gloomy, 
 and set in eternal wastes of water and mud, 
 stretched the moss-hung cypress forests and 
 magnolia groves. From a little way out to 
 sea this vast jungle had the appearance of a 
 mass of low hills running in a billowy line 
 against the sky. 
 
 No one without actual experience in ex- 
 ploring such a region can form any adequate 
 idea of even the general effect of its features. 
 
 Except where the cypress trees grow thin 
 in basins of water the plants of all kinds, 
 from immense live oaks down to the smallest 
 aquatic weeds, are packed together so that 
 one can scarcely force a way through them. 
 
SWAMP SKETCHES. 51 
 
 And yet the soil is not at all rich, even on 
 the hummocks, as compared with the soil 
 of our Western prairies. It is by night that 
 the swamp shows itself to the full expression 
 of its gloom, its solitude, and its real grand- 
 eur. Leaving the boatmen at the camp, I 
 spent the greater part of a night in the very 
 heart of the jungle simply to study it. 
 
 The moon did not rise till after ten, so I 
 had two hours of intense darkness during 
 which I used my ears instead of my eyes. 
 
 Silence vast and profound is the rule in the 
 swamp, but the exception is often very im- 
 pressive, sometimes startling. As an in- 
 stance of this : I was comfortably seated on 
 a log between two cypress trees, about five 
 feet above the ground, waiting for the moon 
 to rise. There was no light to relieve the 
 oppressive blackness save a faint gleam of 
 sky overhead where some pale stars winked 
 through a rift. The sea breeze could not 
 reach me, but it sighed very lightly in the 
 topmost feathery tufts of the trees. The 
 beach was so far away that only a faint, 
 mellow roar came from its swashing surf. 
 
 I had a gun across my knees, and so felt 
 no actual fear, but yet there was an unpleas- 
 ant sense of my helplessness in the presence 
 of darkness, silence, solitude, and the spirit 
 hovering in the midst of them. It was as if 
 a hand were about to be laid upon me from 
 behind, or as if a great mesh of destruction 
 were upon the point of closing around me in 
 the darkness. A damp chill hung in the 
 still atmosphere, accompanied by a peculiar 
 musty odor, comparable to nothing else, ex- 
 cept, perhaps, the noisome wafts from old 
 tombs and caves. 
 
 Jo the midst of alj this an owl hooted not 
 
52 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 far off, and the cry was so emphasized and 
 exaggerated by contrast with the environment 
 that its effect was indescribable. At first I 
 did not recognize it as an owl's voice, but 
 referred it to some wild beast, a panther, 
 perhaps, and put myself on the defensive. 
 During the years that I was a soldier I was 
 never half so frightened in fight as I was by 
 that sound. Of course I pulled myself to- 
 gether in a moment, but the sudden impres- 
 sion was one never to be forgotten ; a pang 
 of awful terror whisked through me like an 
 electric shock. 
 
 I suppose that every one who has sat all 
 alone in a forest by night has felt the pecul- 
 iar impression as of a dusky presence draw- 
 ing stealthily closer and closer to him. It is 
 imaginary, but no real thing could be more 
 clearly outlined to one's inner sense. For a 
 while after the owl's hideous notes had died 
 away in diminuendo echoes throughout the 
 forest caverns this breathless black spectre of 
 the night oppressed me, but I finally shook it 
 off. 
 
 The next sound that I heard was that of a 
 body, perhaps a raccoon, passing down a 
 tree-trunk near by with a scratching and 
 scrambling that was a relief to my nerves, 
 for it was familiar and realistic. At length 
 the little animal reached the ground and 
 made its way to a puddle of water, where it 
 played for some time. Then something 
 frightened it, it may have become suddenly 
 aware of my presence, and it scampered far 
 away through the woods. Somehow its pre- 
 cipitate flight affected me strangely, and I 
 half imagined that some hideous being of the 
 darkness had approached from the depth of 
 the jungle and frightened it away. I listened 
 
SWAMP SKETCHES. 53 
 
 with suspended breath, but not a sound came 
 to my ears. There must have followed 
 nearly an hour of utter silence, such as no 
 inexperienced person can possibly imagine, a 
 silence felt as a positive element far exceed- 
 ing in impressiveness the mere absence of all 
 sounds. 
 
 No doubt my self -consciousness, as I sat 
 there systematically observing every sensa- 
 tion and every fancy generated by the sur- 
 roundings, helped to heighten the influence 
 of the situation. Moreover, there was an at- 
 mospheric oppressiveness owing to the dense- 
 ness of the jungle and the lack of free ven- 
 tilation. 
 
 It was with a sense of relief that I noted 
 the first gleam that foretold the coming of the 
 moon ; but instead of softening the effect the 
 slowly-increasing light added a myriad gro- 
 tesque features to the landscape around me. 
 
 I could understand now how the early 
 Spanish and French explorers of these South- 
 ern regions came to tell such wonderful sto- 
 ries of old castles in Florida, and of ruined 
 cities in the midst of almost impenetrable 
 swamps; for when the moonshine became 
 strong enough to guide me I wandered from 
 place to place, fastening in my memory the 
 scenes as they appeared, and the commonest 
 form of the cypress and live oak clumps seen 
 beyond any opening, especially over water, 
 were those of ruined villas and castles, old 
 moats, and crumbling battlements. 
 
 The frogs and alligators began a desultory 
 grunting and booming as the moon came up, 
 but these sounds died out soon, giving way, 
 apparently, to the wild hilarity of a great 
 laughing owl, whose voice was equal to a 
 medium steam whistle in its shrillness and 
 
54 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 compass. It was answered by another, far 
 away, ringing vaguely and faintly, like an 
 echo lost in the interminable jungle. 
 
 As the moonlight grew I made my way 
 from place to place, noting the wonderful 
 changes that came over the landscape with 
 each turn. The trees seemed to grow taller 
 and taller, the shadows blacker and blacker 
 in contrast with the slanting streams of pale, 
 yellowish light falling through the rifts. 
 The tangles of vines and the dense masses of 
 bay and haw trees often forced me to make 
 wide detours. I crawled over great heaps of 
 fallen logs, branches, and tree tops, and 
 through nets of green-briar, till at length I 
 came to the shore of a lakelet, which instantly 
 brought into my mind Poe's 
 
 Dark turn of Auber 
 In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 
 
 It was a still, dark, sullen sheet of water 
 framed in a fantastically grotesque border of 
 jungle, upon which the moonlight was falling 
 with ghostly effect. 
 
 I was tired, almost overcome, indeed, with 
 the exertion ot my ramble, and was glad to 
 perch myself on a huge cypress knee with 
 my heavy rubber boots dangling and drip- 
 ping. I had come to study the swamp, and 
 nothing was to prevent me. Mopping my 
 face and panting, I looked out over the only 
 scene I ever saw that would wholly excuse 
 the adjective weird. Imagine slanting shreds 
 of pallid fog hanging like giant wisps of gos- 
 samer from the water, which was like ink, 
 to the tree-tops which were like charcoal 
 masses against a filmy sky, and then remem- 
 ber the awful solitude, the desolation, the 
 stillness, and that nameless hovering spirit 
 
SWAMP SKETCHES. 56 
 
 of night which haunts remote, uninhabited 
 regions. No phrasing may suggest more 
 than a shadow of such a scene, Some large 
 white birds, snowy herons I supposed, 
 startled by my approach, had risen into the 
 air out of a patch of saw-grass and were flap- 
 ping aimlessly hither and thither, now in the 
 light, now in the shadows, as silent as the 
 brooding silence itself. If I had been the 
 only man in the world, I could not have real- 
 ized more fully the meaning of the word soli- 
 tude. I knew what the swamps of the coal- 
 age of geology looked like; indeed for the 
 time I was back in the days when the groves 
 of lepidodendron and the thickets of giant 
 cane were slowly sinking into the ' ' carbon- 
 iferous seas." Below me were vast forests 
 buried in the mud and sand, and still the pro- 
 cess was going on. 
 
 I have often mentioned the peculiar effect 
 of the plashing sound made by a fish leaping 
 out of still water in the dead of night. A 
 large bass, at least I thought it was from its 
 motion, sprang up in the midst of a dreamy 
 spot of moonlight where the water was deep, 
 and, fairly somer-saulting, fell with a plunge 
 back into the ripple he had made. 
 
 On the side of the lake over against where 
 I sat, a group of immense cypress knees 
 looked like a castle with towers reduplicated 
 in the water underneath them. Farther 
 away fantastic clouds of fog bleached by the 
 moonlight drifted against a black wall, like 
 that of Babylon, upon which stood giant 
 sentinels with spears and shields and gro- 
 tesque helmets. 
 
 Higher climbed the moon, a wan, lop-sided 
 disk of silver, and the scene changed slowly 
 until the lake was shimmering like quick- 
 
56 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 silver, and the fog had arranged itself in 
 beautiful lace- work patterns falling like filmy 
 curtains before the dark masses of the jun- 
 gle. Although I could not notice any air 
 current, this beautiful drapery was swung 
 gently so that it undulated and was folded 
 upon itself in the most delicate ways imagin- 
 able. 
 
 The opposite side of the little lake now ap- 
 peared immeasurably distant, and the out- 
 lines of the tree-masses were so softened that 
 they looked like vague mountains rising out 
 of a calm, dreamy sea, or like those floating 
 scenes in a mirage on our Western plains. 
 
 Meantime the silence and the solitude had 
 been intensified, so to say, until the effect 
 was almost unbearable. 
 
 By one of thpse cerebral tricks for which 
 there is no explanation, the impulse came 
 upon me to break all that infinite, solemn 
 silence by firing my gun. No sooner thought 
 than acted. Right and left, boom, boom, I 
 let go the two heavy charges, and the sounds 
 seemed to shake the earth and jar the .firma- 
 ment above. They leaped a^way into the re- 
 motest distance and then came rattling and 
 tumbling back upon my ears in a thou- 
 sand echoes of every kind. 
 
 What followed was quite common and nat- 
 ural, but it appalled me for a moment, I do 
 not know why. With a great clash of wings 
 an enormous raft of ducks rushed into the 
 air out of the water at the edge of the saw- 
 grass and went away with a stormy roar into 
 the convolutions of the fog. 
 
 After this the silence fell again, deeper, 
 broader, more oppressive than ever. There 
 was something awfully threatening, even 
 menacing in it. I hurriedly reloaded my gun, 
 
SWAMP SKETCHES. 5? 
 
 as if that could protect me from such an 
 assailant. I remember that at this point I 
 thought of my wanderings on Okechobee and 
 recalled seeing a will-o-the-wisp play its 
 pranks on a marsh of the Satilla. 
 
 But I might write volumes and yet not de- 
 scribe a Southern swamp. From the nature 
 of things explorers of these awful mazes are 
 few and timid. I have said nothing of the 
 billions upon billions of musquitoes, nothing 
 of the malaria, and I shall not because I was 
 fortified against both, and they did not 
 trouble me. I came out of the jungle im- 
 pressed with only its grandeur of effect, and 
 with the suggestions its strange features had 
 engendered in my imagination. 
 
 No sky ever looked purer or sweeter, no 
 sea brighter, no air ever filled me with such 
 a sense of freshness. Indeed I came forth 
 upon my white sand-bar as one might come 
 out of a tomb into a blooming garden. 
 
 The boatmen were asleep upon a heap of 
 grass covered with a sail, and the little smack 
 was tossing at anchor not more than a stone's 
 throw out from the surf line. Far out on 
 the horizon a ship with all sails set was bowl- 
 ing along, and there was a melody in my 
 ears like the low singing of a multitude of 
 voices. I lay down upon the sand and 
 slept. 
 
IN THE MATTER OF SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 I HAVE sometimes found myself indulging 
 the fancy that Shakespeare's genius has been 
 greatly overrated or rather overstated 
 even by the most cautious critics and com- 
 mentators ; but I should not like to be forced 
 into a defence of the fancy. Monuments are 
 sacred things, and few men will deny that 
 the Bible and the body of Shakespeare's 
 works are, to English-speaking people at 
 least, the most venerated of all monuments. 
 
 How could any man, no matter how self- 
 confident, go cheerfully about the attempt to 
 prove that Shakespeare has been overrated 
 as a genius ? In the first place, he would 
 have to be a most extraordinary genius him- 
 self, and distinguished as such in the world, 
 before he could command even respectful at- 
 tention as an iconoclast. In the next place, 
 he would have to stem the tide of what has 
 come to be hereditary popular opinion; and 
 he would have to bear the taunts, jibes, kicks, 
 and cuffs of all the Shakespeare- cranks in the 
 whole world to say nothing of the ire of all 
 the publishers who get a big income off the 
 old poet's books. Lastly, he would have no 
 way of proving that the poorest verse in 
 Shakespeare's poorest play is not better than 
 the strongest that Tennyson or Emerson ever 
 wrote. 
 
 Most of us are slow to learn that a Booth 
 may do as much for Shakespeare as the great 
 dramatist can do for a Booth, and that Mod- 
 58 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 59 
 
 jeska may put into Juliet a breath of life not 
 known to Shakespeare's girl. Genius is gen- 
 ius, and asserts itself as superior, in its own 
 particular way, to every other genius in the 
 world. Shakespeare was a genius, and Victor 
 Hugo was as near the right as any critic 
 when he said that criticism cannot apply to 
 genius. We may point out errors of meth- 
 ods, of judgment, of execution, in the works 
 of a genius, but that part of those works 
 which testifies of genius is always beyond our 
 reach. 
 
 In Shakespeare's works this unreachable 
 and therefore unassailable part is very large, 
 and it is incomparably many-sided and many- 
 colored. One reads Shakespeare with confi- 
 dence, because one feels no lurking insincerity 
 between his lines ; there is no conscious art, 
 in other words, padded and intercalated in 
 the tissue and fibre of the work; no posing 
 and attitudinizing of the author in the presence 
 of his creations. We feel sometimes that we 
 have been duped and made game of, but we 
 never catch the trickster wagging his thumbs 
 and puffing his cheeks at us. Indeed Shakes- 
 peare was the first humorist who did not 
 laugh at his own jokes, and he so far remains 
 the last. His simplicity sometimes borders 
 close upon mere baldness and flatness, but his 
 finish never suggests (as does most of our con- 
 temporary work) a laundry secret. 
 
 I should adore Shakespeare, if for nothing 
 else, in recognition of his contempt for ana- 
 lytical realism. How he dashes on color, and 
 with what divine steadfastness he sticks to 
 heroic ideals, even when he appears to be dal- 
 lying with infinitesimals ! You never find him 
 probing and picking at a ganglion of motive 
 to trace it back to some obscure origin, as if 
 
60 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 the whole of life depended upon the absolute 
 accuracy to be attained in microscopic analy- 
 sis. His characters are just as distinctly in- 
 dividual and just as mysterious as real flesh 
 and blood men and women. He, himself, too 
 is intensely human, weak and strong, silly 
 and wise, careful and careless, neat and slip- 
 shod, clean and dirty, but he is never mean 
 
 or vicious - We mav find a g 0(i deal in 
 Chaucer which is so obscene that we doubt 
 old poet's moral grain and fibre, but 
 Shakespeare does not revel in the filth he 
 sometimes handles. There is a severity, an 
 immovable manner, a steadfastness of coun- 
 tenance, so to say, attending him in his deal- 
 ings with the unclean, as if he felt no touch of 
 any sentiment whatever in the matter. 
 
 Your modern artist, if he dared speak his 
 feeling, would say that Shakespeare was not 
 an artist. Well, he was not; he was some- 
 thing better ; he was a genius whose power 
 needed none of the factitious aids character- 
 istic of modern literary and graphic art. He 
 had a superb imagination and an infinitely 
 flexible style of expression without any tech- 
 nical expertness or smartness whatever. 
 Prettiness and exquisite finish of surface he 
 never thought of. Even his sonnets have 
 something of the swing and freedom of a 
 young god's movement. I confess that I do 
 not have any idea of what they mean, but I 
 feel their value as I feel the value of the sky 
 and the clouds they are fire and smoke pas- 
 sion and dimness. If we compare Shakes- 
 peare with some great writer of the present 
 day, Victor Hugo, say, the first strong line 
 of contrast is the self-consciousness of the lat- 
 ter. We cannot ignore Hugo's or Goethe's ob- 
 vious attitudinizing in front of their subjects.. 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 61 
 
 Even Tennyson uses the egotistic pronoun 
 with an emphasis not to be misunderstood. 
 
 Shakespeare was lucky in many ways, as 
 genius always is, and he has had better ,luck 
 since he died than he had while living : an- 
 other franchise of the children of glory. As 
 the years have rolled by publishers have in- 
 creased, and what publisher ever died with- 
 out issuing his special edition of Shakespeare? 
 As the leaves of the forests have authors in- 
 creased ; what scribbler ever goes hungry to 
 his grave without having written his essay 
 on the Bard of Avon ? Headers have become 
 as countless as the sands of the sea, and all 
 have read or are just going to read Hamlet 
 and the rest. We are born with an heredi 
 tary Shakespeare bias, and we go toward his 
 works as the young snapping-turtle goes 
 toward water, as if the act were an instinctive 
 one. 
 
 There are "men who, if they dared, would 
 burn at the stake any human being who in 
 his sincerity should admit that he found As 
 You Like It a very dull affair. Once in the 
 hospitable home of the late Paul H. Hayne I 
 said that I did not regard some of Shakes- 
 peare's works as of any great value, when lo ! 
 the gracious and kindly Southern poet leaped 
 to his feet and poured forth upon my devoted 
 head a flood of eloquent and indignant protest 
 the like of which I never have heard else- 
 where. Indeed, one does not dare be inde- 
 pendent in the matter of discussing the old 
 master. Not worship Shakespeare ! one might 
 as well deny the attraction of gravitation, or 
 suggest a new theory of politeness which 
 would ignore the swallow-tailed coat. Some 
 things are true because it is death to deny 
 them. Snobbery is kept alive and fat all over 
 
62 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 the world because it is safer to be a snob than 
 to be a sincere and independent man. The 
 lords and kings and princes have said that a 
 swallow-tailed coat is just the thing, and even 
 the hotel waiter cannot cheapen it. So the 
 Moguls of criticism have said : "Shakespeare 
 is incomparable," and how shall any clod 
 gainsay it ? They used to say something 
 pretty about Homer, too, but Greek is no 
 longer fashionable. It proves something, how- 
 ever, this firm hold that the old English bard 
 keeps on the moulders of public opinion. It 
 requires extraordinary genius to live up to 
 the standard these intolerant worshippers 
 have set for their god, and so far Shakespeare 
 has lost little ground, if we may judge by the 
 increased number of editions he is subjected 
 to by enthusiastic editors and hopeful pub- 
 lishers every year. 
 
 This matter of editing Shakespeare, as it is 
 called, has a broad tinge of humor as I view 
 it. All this hair-splitting over doubtful read- 
 ings is ludicrous, if one dared say so. In the 
 old bard's own manner there is very little to 
 set an example of carping or higgling about a 
 word or the turn of a phrase. He put things 
 forth with a direct stroke of his pen, as Turner 
 after him did with the brush, giving not the 
 slightest heed to the infinitesimals about which 
 the wise little commentators pretend to know 
 so much. A Shakespearian scholar reminds 
 me always of an expert in fossil bryozoans 
 he is so dry and narrow, so fretful and pig- 
 headed when he finds a man standing before 
 him who dares to have a soul of his own that 
 he would like to unburden. This reading, 
 that edition, the other commentary, some- 
 body's interpolation what's the difference so 
 that I get the broad wash of ibhought, the in- 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 63 
 
 comparable impressions the kaleidoscopic 
 views of life and manners. What do I care 
 whether or no the celebrated Professor Nose- 
 mout has given his consent to the edition I 
 am reading ? Nee te senserem. It is Shakes- 
 peare I care for, not the little man with the 
 eye-glasses and the many commentaries and 
 editions. To be particularly sincere, I would 
 not give a straw to be able to read the great 
 cipher of Donnelly. Life is so short and wis- 
 dom is so broad. 
 
 Still, if a young person came to me asking 
 how to get grounded in literary wisdom I 
 should say: Go study Shakespeare, as you 
 would study Nature, not as a specialist, but 
 in a liberal and free way. What edition? 
 Any edition. Whose notes? Nobody's. Make 
 your own notes, insist upon your own inter- 
 pretations, then go hear some good reader 
 like Booth or Lawrence Barrett or Mod jeska ; 
 but at last cling to your own private opinions. 
 Of course these opinions will be modified 
 and specialized as you grow, but you must 
 not let them hybridize and lose the precious 
 elements of your own originality, least of 
 all must you let the little buzzing insects, 
 self-styled commentators and editors, fertilize 
 the fresh flowers of your mind. The pollen 
 they carry is nothing but shelf -dust and book- 
 mould; it will make your brain like an 
 autumn puff-ball. Go into the open air and 
 read your open-type copy of Shakespeare 
 under a tree wherein the birds sing and the 
 wind rustles. You will find his effects 
 broad, like the sky and the sea; narrow, like 
 the brook; tangled and fretted, like the 
 vine-worried groves ; earthy as the earth it- 
 self. As plays, all these works were made 
 for the stage, therefore much of their stuff, is 
 
64 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 mere stuff indeed, but these people are peo- 
 ple, these heroes are heroes, these villains 
 are villains, and these lovers are genuine old- 
 time sweet-kissing and hard-fighting ones that 
 it does one's soul good to read about once 
 more, after some dozens of modern novels. 
 
 Since Scott no English novelist has sug- 
 gested a comparison with the great drama- 
 tist, unless we consider Bulwer at his very 
 best. Hugo and Goethe, barring their miser- 
 able egotism, are Shakespeare's equals (at 
 some points, his superiors) ; but they lack his 
 equipoise, his constant suggestion of a reserve 
 of power. Hugo now and again wallows and 
 flounders, like a whale in shallow water, 
 Goethe struts, scowls, smiles and laughs in 
 turn, and always with the air of feeling his 
 own superiority; but Shakespeare is stead- 
 fast, liberal-faced, never surprised by his 
 own wit and never in need of extrinsic aid. 
 
 If any young writer of to-day could master 
 himself so as to be as self-possessed as 
 Shakespeare was, we might call him a thor- 
 ough-bred author. Vulgar fussiness and 
 anxiety about the fit of one's phases is what 
 one can scarcely avoid in this day of clever 
 stylists and smart analysts ; and yet this was 
 just what all the truly great authors of the 
 past really did. Read Shakespeare's plays 
 and note how like the heavy blows of a la- 
 boring swain are the most telling of his lines. 
 Even he loses when he turns back to polish a 
 verse or remodel a phrase. It was little 
 Horace, not big Homer, who set such high 
 value on the details of verse-making. Then? 
 are a great many little Horaces now, but 
 where is our grand Homer? 
 
 The study of large models cannot fail to 
 give some feeling of breadth, even to a small 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 65 
 
 mind ; hence the reading of Shakespeare is of 
 prime importance to one who dreams of mak- 
 ing literature some day. Not that writing 
 plays like Shakespeare's ever will be profit- 
 able again; the good will come in what is 
 caught of Shakespeare's contempt of leading- 
 strings and of his love of the ideal. Original- 
 ity in his [works means a Shakespearian use 
 of whatever came to fris hand. He employed 
 no tricks, appealed to no mock-foam or stage- 
 thunder to strengthen a weak passage. Men 
 quarrel to-day over the question of Hamlet's 
 mental condition; but Shakespeare saw no 
 need for any foot-note. There are many 
 very weak places in his plays, but each play 
 makes a distinct and clear-cut impression. 
 It is this impression which constitutes true 
 value in every work of art. No mind can be 
 unenlightened which is full of the spirit ot 
 Shakespeare's works ; but one may ber#sme a 
 mere book-louse by creeping too long among 
 the words and phrases of them. Note well 
 the difference. If you come to the reading 
 of Shakespeare with the cringing soul of a 
 snob in you, the reading will be in vain. 
 Read him, just as you would read Mark 
 Twain, with a feeling of democratic indepen- 
 dence. He was no more a god than you are 
 a god; he was nothing but a large-headed, 
 open-eyed, self-reliant man who was gifted 
 with a talent for writing good plays. He 
 would not thank you for saying that the 
 poorest of his sonnets are better than the 
 best of Keats' : for he would know that you 
 were not sincere. Keats wrote one or two 
 sonnets that are incomparably better than 
 any of Shakespeare's. 
 
 I say this without blinking, for I am writ- 
 ing in a pine woods on the shore of the Mexi- 
 5 
 
66 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 can Guli, far out of any so-called Shakespear 
 ian scholar's reach. Beside me lies a volume 
 of Alden's Ideal Edition of the works of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare, the cheapest and clearest- 
 typed edition I have yet seen. You may 
 read it as you walk; I have read it as I 
 walked, communing with the Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona under the moaning pines and 
 mossy live-oaks, while the lazy wash of the 
 Gulf waves and the lazy touch of the Gulf 
 breeze "filled in the symphonies between." 
 Forgive me, but once in a while a mocking- 
 bird makes me forget that there ever was 
 a Shakespeare. Just a while ago I flung 
 down the Ideal to run and peep at a shy 
 songster flitting about in a cedar thicket. I 
 like living things, and in spite of all that I 
 can do a live titmouse is more to my taste 
 than a dead poet. There are some wonderful 
 fossils, but even a mammoth's jaw is not so 
 interesting as a warm, buzzing, flaming hum- 
 ming bird bobbing at a flower. 
 
 A vast quantity of good breath has been 
 wasted telling over and over and over the 
 threadbare romance of how incomparable are 
 the works of the old art-masters, a lie which 
 has to be kept warm by the constant friction 
 of telling. The romance of Shakespeare is 
 of the same sort ; but the truth about him is 
 wonderful enough the truth that makes him 
 a great man, like Napoleon, Newton, Phidias, 
 Homer, Dante and Hugo greater in some 
 ways than any of these and not half as great 
 in other ways; a man whose glaring faults 
 stand out in his works, and whose rare gifts 
 those works do not half disclose the truth 
 in short, that he was. like any other genius, 
 a curious bundle of greatness and common- 
 ness. 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 67 
 
 VVhen I was a boy they made me wash my 
 face, comb my hair and put on a broad white 
 collar before they would let me go to the 
 book-shelves and take down the old leather- 
 backed, heavy -ribbed book they called by the 
 sacred name of Shakespeare. In those days 
 I devoutly believed all they said about that 
 man's perfectness and universality of genius. 
 Indeed it was with a sense of profound guilt 
 that one day I discovered a doubt. I had 
 been reading Tennyson and my head and my 
 heart were full of new and glorious sounds, 
 colors, longings, and dreams. I know to the 
 last pang how a Christian must feel who sud- 
 denly lapses into infidelit^ for did I not fall 
 from the grace of Shakespeare- worship ? It 
 was a final fall, too, for I never have got 
 wholly back and never shall. 
 
 Still Shakespeare stands alone (so does 
 Shelley) and he stands alone in the highest 
 realm of art. Quantity as well as quality 
 (when the quality is always high) goes to 
 prove great genius. Many men have done 
 one act of perfect creation, falling back to 
 mere mediocrity afterward ; but it is only the 
 few who can keep up the ecstasy of the 
 maker for many years together. We may 
 count these on our fingers: Homer, Milton, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, and 
 Hugo the list would be short, but such a list! 
 I am not quite sure that Emerson ought to be 
 left out, for he was one of the calm and lofty 
 ones who build for all time, and yet he sug- 
 gested rather than created the best of his ef- 
 fects. All these great men impress us with 
 the peculiar sereneness of their bearing under 
 the infinite white heat of poetic ecstasy. 
 Carlyle fell short here and hence cannot be 
 galled great. 
 
68 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 Naturalists tell us about highly specialized 
 animal forms those that have departed most 
 from the prototype. There is a figure here 
 with which great genius like Shakespeare's 
 may be represented the old, simple, univer- 
 sal human mind. Shakespeare was not a 
 specialized man, he was a specimen left over 
 from the ancient virile race long since wor- 
 shipped as gods. Walt Whitman consciously 
 and with great labor has tried to be such a 
 specimen he has tried to stand for mankind, 
 but his great assumption of virility is vox et 
 preterca u.ihil save in a few splendid excep- 
 tions. 
 
 At last it is Shakespeare's sincere and per- 
 fect love of his race, his brimming humanity, 
 his commanding simplicity, his courage, his 
 abounding sympathy, his liberality, that will 
 always draw men to him. We speak of per- 
 sonal magnetism when we mean a man's 
 power to influence his fellows. This magnet- 
 ism of manhood exhales from all the works 
 of genius, and especially from those of Shakes- 
 peare. Walt Whitman asserts for himself in 
 rude and almost brutal phrasing what Shakes- 
 peare never claims, but always has to over- 
 flowingthe vigor and rugged self -sufficiency 
 of the primitive man. I have noticed that all 
 grand men assert themselves with irresistible 
 force but always without noise or contortion 
 or bluster. A steadfast eye. a calm face, a 
 quiet manner, an even voice. The gods turned 
 men to stone by a glance. The clouds and 
 storms are always far below the serene blue 
 sky in whose depth the empyrean fire steadily 
 burns. 
 
 Coming to the study of Shakespeare with- 
 out any taint of literary snobbery, and wholly 
 free from mere hero-worship looking upon 
 
SHAKESPEARE. 69 
 
 him as quite subject to criticism and quite 
 vulnerable to it, one should choose an edition 
 without notes. A glossary is well enough ; 
 but one rarely uses it. The gist of the plays 
 is not to be found in the obsolete words. 
 Anybody can understand Shakespeare, pro- 
 vided the Shakespeare scholars are forbidden 
 admission to the study during the reading. 
 
THE MOTIF OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 " And some are hearing, eagerly, the wild, 
 Thrilling liquidity of dewy piping." KEATS. 
 
 WHAT may be called the romance of bird- 
 song has been the common property of poets 
 and enthusiastic descriptive writers of prose 
 from the time that the Cadmean contagion of 
 letters slipped into the life of man. Indeed, 
 ever since the old Hebrew lyrist heard the 
 voice of the turtle in his land, there has been 
 a human echo to every trill and warble flung 
 out of bush and bough all round the verna^ 
 ojrele of the sarth. It ias been well said by 
 one of our ablest ornithologists, Dr. Doues, 
 Jhat man and bird are the two animals that 
 sing and enjoy song. This love of sweet 
 sounds has formed between these widely dif- 
 ferent and extremely specialized beings a 
 golden cord of sympathy, which has been 
 kept sweetly vibrating for ages with inter- 
 change of melodious mouthings. 
 
 I have often thought that it would be a 
 most welcome book, if some competent per- 
 son should construct a carefully arranged 
 anthology of the bird-lyrics worthy of note 
 written in English since the days of Chaucer ; 
 or better still, of all the best bird-songs of 
 every language from the beginning of time. 
 Such a work would disclose a singular and 
 beautiful phase of human history a phase 
 from which the literary student might gather 
 rich treasure, and out of which the scientist 
 might distil the essence of precious truths. 
 70 
 
MOTIF OF BIKD SONG. 71 
 
 Doubtless there is a cause, deep set in the 
 mystery of life, from which arises in accord- 
 ance with some natural law, the instinctive 
 interchange of affection between man and the 
 song-birds. I say instinctive because I am 
 not convinced that reason has anything to do 
 with the matter. A man may be an ardent 
 admirer of birds, and yet be an enthusiastic 
 sportsman ready to kill them for mere 
 amusement, in which he is as irrational as is 
 the jay that would pluck out the eyes of him 
 who feeds it in the dead of winter, provided 
 it chanced to imagine the eyes to be as lus- 
 cious as the berries of the brier. 
 
 There is an impulse a law other than the 
 instinctive movement toward food and pro- 
 tection, which causes the song-bird to get 
 close to man. I could gather many facts to- 
 gether in proof of this. Indeed, all the lower 
 animals are capable of loving man, and many 
 of them have often and voluntarily sought to 
 show such affection. 
 
 Mr. Huxley, in accordance with the infer- 
 ence enforced by a great number of anatomi- 
 cal facts, has grouped the birds and reptiles 
 together under the name sauropsida; and it 
 has come to be pretty generally admitted 
 among scientists that, whether the avian race 
 has or has not actually descended from a 
 reptilian ancestor, there is certainly a like- 
 ness existing which justifies the inference of 
 such an origin, especially in the absence of 
 any tenable theory to the contrary based on 
 scientific reasoning. In this connection it is 
 a striking fact that no mammal, of its own 
 accord, ever has sought the companionship of 
 man as freely and sincerely, so to speak, as 
 many of the birds and some of the reptiles 
 have. I have seen toads, lizards, and even 
 
72 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 snakes exhibit great satisfaction in finding a 
 cosey nook for themselves in human habita- 
 tions. I once had a toad friend who fattened 
 to enormous size at my expense, and I had 
 ample opportunity to note the growth (quite 
 apace with his corporeal expansion) of his af- 
 fection for me. He sought my acquaintance 
 and cultivated my friendship of his own mo- 
 tion, evidently taking it for granted that I 
 could not fail to feel highly honored by his 
 attentions. Birds have made their love for 
 man so well known that I need offer no in- 
 stances. A few words in the way of sugges- 
 tion, however, may not be amiss, with a view 
 to leading up to a consideration of the origin of 
 the song-impulse in birds. Genuine song, or, 
 rather, music-making, is within the power of 
 comparatively few of the avian family ; but 
 we may consider such birds as the meadow- 
 lark, the bluebird, and the blue-jay, that can 
 utter a bar of two or three sweet notes, song- 
 birds for all the purposes we have in view, 
 and from these lowly and slightly gifted ones 
 we may pass up along the line to such musical 
 prodigies as the nightingale and the mocking- 
 bird. 
 
 Pious minds, influenced by the charm of 
 spring, long ago came to the conclusion that 
 song-birds were ecstatic worshippers of Deity, 
 and that all their pipings were conscious 
 praise-offerings. At the other extreme, the 
 scientists have referred bird-song to erotic 
 impulses when in the spring the wild-bird's 
 fancy 
 
 " Lightly turns to thoughts of love." 
 
 What shall we say of the caged bird that 
 sings in a broken and sketchy way the whole 
 year round? Does captivity engender per- 
 
MOTIF OF B1UD SONG. 73 
 
 ennial piety? or does it make the tender pas- 
 sion unquenchably and constantly burn? I 
 have heard the crested titmouse utter its 
 slight song-sketch in mid-January on parallel 
 40 north when the thermometer indicated a 
 heavy dip below zero. On the other hand, I 
 have known fine male mocking-birds that re- 
 fused to sing for two weeks together in the 
 most golden period of a southern spring-time, 
 when the felicity of the mating and nesting 
 experience was at its highest height. I have 
 watched a lonely blue-jay, a mile removed 
 from his mate, sit on a bough and, with a 
 peculiar rhythmic motion of the body, give 
 forth a low, wheedling strain which could not 
 be heard more than ten or twenty yards 
 away. The indigo-bird has a very sweet, 
 twittering song, which is scarelyloud enough 
 Co be distinguished two rods from where he 
 sits, and yet he will pour it forth ecstatically 
 in the midst of a prairie, with none of his spe- 
 cies within the horizon. I have heard the 
 meadow-lark and the bluebird pipe their 
 dreamy scores in every month of the year, 
 regardless of the season of love. The cardinal 
 grossbeak does not wait for the time 
 
 " Whan that Aprille with her showres swoote 
 The drought of March hath pierced to the roote," 
 
 in order to begin his loud and cheery fluting 
 in the thickets, but will act as if December 
 were 
 
 " as pleasant as May." 
 
 Still, the larger fact is that spring is the 
 season when the volume of bird-song poured 
 round the world is incomparably stronger, 
 fuller, and sweeter than at any other; and 
 that, too, is the season of mating and of nest- 
 
?4 SYLVAN SEC BET 8. 
 
 ing. Our finest songsters, notable the mock- 
 ing-bird, the cat-bird, and the brown thrush, 
 rarely "tune their throats " before the earliest 
 wild-flowers bloom. I have noticed that on 
 the coast of the Gulf of Mexico the first song 
 of the mocking-bird is a pretty safe announce- 
 ment of the blowing of the pitcher-plant and 
 the little white daisy in the sandy bogs of the 
 pineries. And the further fact that these 
 plants and the mocking-bird's voice vary in 
 their coming between extremes reaching from 
 the 10th of February to the 15th of March, 
 according to the season, is significant of some 
 fine sympathetic relationship between the 
 vernal impulse and that of the bird's song. I 
 was of the opinion until quite recently that 
 the bird's vocal organs underwent a change, 
 just before the mating season, which specially 
 fitted them for melodious utterances; but 
 many dissections have proved the contrary. 
 There is no appreciable organic change in the 
 syrinx, larynx, tongue, or mouth of the mock- 
 ing-bird, the brown thrush, or the cat-bird, in 
 the spring. 
 
 Nearly all the most charming of the singing- 
 birds prefer the early morning and the even- 
 ing twilight for their vocal performances, 
 though some of them sing far in the night. 
 The matin-song of our American robin will 
 convince any one who observes closely that 
 the witchery of the dewy, fragrant day-dawn 
 is the bird's inspiration, and no person who 
 has heard the mocking-bird's dreamy night- 
 lay can doubt that it is a fine expression of 
 the nocturnal influence. The Baltimore ori- 
 ole comes to our Northern States in May, and 
 he comes as if floating down the tide of his 
 own rather monotonously sweet song. For a 
 time he sings from dawn till dark, in a fitful, 
 
MOTIF OF J3IBD SOtfG. 75 
 
 wandering way, as he flits about all alone. 
 His notes have an absent-minded ring, as if in 
 his diligence in food-hunting he were forget- 
 ting to put expression into his lay. Indeed, all 
 our birds use what we call their voices, just 
 as we use ours, for the purposes of expression 
 generally, and I am convinced that bird-song 
 proper, though oftenest the expression of 
 some phase of the tender passion, is not con- 
 fined to such expression. In a limited way 
 birds have their lyric and their dramatic 
 moods, their serious and their comic songs, 
 their recitative and their oratorical methods. 
 They are conscious of any especial superiority 
 of voice, just as they are keenly aware of any 
 particular brilliancy of colors on their plum 
 nge. It may be noticed, in passing, that here 
 i. ;dii the birds and reptiles agree (many of 
 the latter giving evidence of a taste for 
 bright colors), while below man no other ani- 
 mals show much more than mere curiosity in 
 this regard. A parrot having gay feathers in 
 its wings and tail will display them to please 
 your eye in return for the favor of a nut or a 
 cracker, without ever having been taught to 
 do it. It is conscious of the fact that brilliant 
 colors are acceptable to the eye, and it in- 
 stinctively seeks to thank you, so to say, by 
 the delicate strut which uncovers all its hid- 
 den wealth of red, yellow, and blue. So the 
 sweetest sounds at its command are instinc- 
 tively flung out by the song-bird whenever it 
 feels especially happy. The migratory song- 
 birds, upon their spring arrival, are (no doubt) 
 delighted at finding themselves once more in 
 their breeding haunts, and immediately they 
 begin to give free vent to their feelings through 
 their melodious throats. It would be interest- 
 ing to know whether or not they do the same 
 
76 STL VAN SECRETS. 
 
 at the extreme southern end of their migra- 
 tion. I have noted that along the gulf -coast 
 of Mississippi and Louisiana the non-resident 
 mocking-birds, when they first come in from 
 farther south, are noisily communicative of 
 their ecstatic pleasure. For a few days they 
 make the groves ring with their songs, then 
 pass on farther north, many of them finally 
 reaching Tennessee, some going over the 
 mountains to Kentucky, and a few touching 
 with a light spray of melody the southern- 
 most knobs of Ohio and Indiana. I might 
 easily mass a large sum of facts going to show 
 that no one desire or instinctive emotion is 
 the sole cause of bird-song. That the tender 
 passion engenders lyrical fervor and makes a 
 feathered troubadour of the gay sylvan lover 
 there can be no doubt, but love is not always 
 at the root of the lay. The song-bird is a 
 gourmand of the most pronounced type, and 
 we find him going into a rapture of sweet 
 sounds over a feast of insects or fruit. He 
 enjoys bright colors, too, so that he is always 
 hilarious when he finds himself in the midst 
 of green leaves and beautiful bloom-sprays. 
 A haw-bush or wild apple-tree in full flower 
 often is the inspiration of the brown thrush 
 and the cat-bird. In a certain way, indeed, 
 the birds are true poets, singing forth the in- 
 fluence of their environments just as Burns 
 sang his, just as Millet painted his. I do not 
 mean to be fanciful in this regard. Call it in- 
 stinct, as it is, and say that birds do not 
 reason, which is true ; but add, nevertheless, 
 the indisputable fact that instinct is of kin to 
 genius, in that it has its origin (as genius has 
 its) in the simplest and purest elements of 
 nature, and so you will get my meaning. 
 It is impossible to know, with any degree 
 
MOTIF OF BIED SONG. 77 
 
 of certainty, how clear or how dim may bo 
 the bird's conception of melody or of beauty ; 
 but we can know that its enjoyment of color 
 and sweet sounds is most intense. The wood- 
 pecker, beating his unique call on a bit of 
 hard, elastic wood, is making an effort, blind 
 and crude enough, but still an effort, to ex- 
 press a musical mood vaguely floating in his 
 nature. We may not laugh at him, so long 
 as from the interior of Africa explorers bring 
 forth the hideous caricatures of musical in- 
 struments that some tribes of our own genus 
 delight themselves withal. Among the South- 
 ern negroes it was once common to see a 
 dancer going through an intricate terpsicho- 
 rean score to the music of a "pat," which 
 was a rhythmical hand-clapping performed 
 by a companion. I mention this in connection 
 with the suggestion that the chief difference 
 between the highest order of bird-music and 
 the lowest order of man-music is expressed 
 by the word rhythm. There is no such an el- 
 ement as the rhythmic beat in any bird-song 
 that I have heard. Modulation and fine 
 shades of "color, "as the musical critic has 
 it, together with melodious phrasing, take the 
 place of rhythm. The meadow-lark, in its 
 mellow fluting, comes very near to a measure 
 of two rhythmic beats, and the mourning 
 dove puts a throbbing cadence into its plaint ; 
 but the accent which the human ear demands 
 is wholly wanting in each case. On the other 
 hand, the mocking-bird, the cat-bird, and the 
 brown thrush accentuate their songs, but not 
 rhythmically; indeed, the cat-bird's utter- 
 ance is an impetuous stream of glittering ac- 
 cents, as it were irregular, tricksy, flippant, 
 and yet as symmetrical, in a certain sense, as 
 the bird itself and the mocking-bird's song 
 
78 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 is like a flashing stream of water flowing over 
 stones in the sunlight and flinging ariose bub- 
 bles and tinkling spray in every direction. 
 I have watched birds at their singing under 
 many and widely differing circumstances, 
 and I am sure that they express joyous antic- 
 ipation, present content and pleasant recol- 
 lection, each as the mood moves, and all with 
 equal ease. It is not so plain, however, that 
 the avian nature is fitted to formulate hate, 
 or .sorrow, or anger in song, for any unpleas- 
 ant mood seems to take expression in cries 
 altogether unmusical. I have never heard 
 one sweet note by any angry or, in any way, 
 unhappy bird. The avian life is beset with 
 every danger except, probably, that of epi- 
 demic disease, and yet so flexible and elastic 
 is it that the moment any terrible ordeal is 
 past the bird is quite ready for a new and en- 
 ergetic effort in song-singing. 
 
 It may not be out of the way to say, in pa- 
 rentheses, here, that the practice of studying 
 domesticated or semi-domesticated birds, with 
 a view to applying the results to forming a 
 theory of wild-bird life, is by no means a safe 
 one. Domestication deprives birds of their 
 proper food, and tends to shorten their lives 
 and to disintegrate their characters. A mock- 
 ing-bird reared in captivity is very interest- 
 ing, and it may sing loudly and well, but it 
 is not to be compared with the free wild-bird 
 that sings in a Southern grove, with its mate 
 demurely hovering near. Domestication in- 
 duces departure from fixed habit, and in the 
 highly specialized song-bird fixed habit is de- 
 veloped to almost the last degree ; in fact, is 
 not the highest type of bird the completest 
 animal, in point of physical equipoise and fit- 
 for indefinite prolongation of individual 
 
MOTIF OF BIRD SONG. 79 
 
 life, that the earth holds, man not excepted ? 
 I do not undertake to answer my interroga- 
 tory directly ; but to me it is significant in 
 this connection that of all the hundreds nay, 
 thousands of wild-birds that I have killed, 
 and have seen killed, and of all that I have 
 dissected for one purpose or other, I have 
 never found one that was diseased, so far as 
 I could discover, save from wounds, unless 
 the presence of intestinal worms in a perfectly 
 strong and healthy appearing subject may 
 have indicated disease. I have dissected and 
 minutely examined the mouth, throat, larynx, 
 syrinx, and lungs of a great number of song 
 birds, and in every case those organs have 
 been in a perfectly normal and healthy state, 
 so far as I could by any means discover. 
 
 Among human beings a fine voice is the 
 notable exception ; among male mocking- 
 birds in a wild state there is no exception 
 they all sing, and so nearly equally well that 
 it requires close attention to discover any dif- 
 ference. So one wild bluebird's piping is 
 practically identical, in volume, compass, and 
 timbre, with that of every other wild male 
 bluebird in the world. From this and a hun- 
 dred kindred facts, it is safe to say that gene- 
 ration and the constant transmission of or- 
 ganic power and equipoise are very nearly 
 perfect with birds of the highest order. In- 
 deed, in song, as in so many other ways, the 
 bird shows the operation of a nearly unerring 
 heredity, and I have been forced to conclude, 
 from all that I have been able to note in the 
 lives and habits of song-birds, that a good 
 part of bird-song is the mechanical response 
 to what may be called hereditary memory. 
 The mocking-bird, reared in captivity, far 
 from the haunts of its ancestors, will repeat 
 
80 SYLVAN SECItETS. 
 
 the cries of birds it has never seen and whose 
 voices it has never heard. I have heard it do 
 this. Not only the power to mimic is heredi- 
 tary, but there, lingering in the 'bird's nature, 
 is the memory, so to call it, of the voices it is 
 born to mimic the voices its ancestors mim- 
 icked ten thousand years ago. 
 
 It has been the fashion for men of science 
 to make light of the common legend of the 
 power of birds and other animals to foretell 
 rain and other meteorological phenomena; 
 but I long ago learned to credit it in a large 
 degree. Birds are not always right in their 
 predictions, because weather-threats are not 
 always carried out. The yellow-billed cuckoo 
 is more vociferous when the barometer indi- 
 cates rain, but often the barometer fails 
 to fetch the shower. The tree-frog, another 
 sort of song-bird, squeals and chirps at the 
 first indication of a rain -atmosphere, but the 
 rain may fail to come. Birds sing with 'em- 
 phasis after a shower, as if they felt as much 
 refreshed as the violets, and the clover, and 
 the maple-leaves, and no doubt they do thus 
 express some sense of delight in their revivi- 
 fied surroundings, just as they have sung or 
 cackled in pleasant anticipation of the same 
 before it came. 
 
 I have seen a mocking-bird eat the best 
 part of a luscious pear or apricot, and then 
 leap to the topmost spray of the tree and sing 
 as if it would trill itself into fragments for 
 very joy of the feast. The shrike cannot 
 sing, but after impaling a grasshopper on a 
 thorn he will make a hideous effort to be 
 melodious over the deed. So the bluejay will 
 utter its softest and sweetest "oodle-doo, oo- 
 dle-doo," as soon as it has wiped its bill clear 
 of the blood-stain received in murdering a 
 
MOTIF OF BIRD SONG. 81 
 
 nest-full of young sparrows. Even the belted 
 king-fisher cackles gleefully every time he 
 swallows a minnow, as the barn-yard hen 
 does when she has laid an egg. 
 
 Buffon, in his charming sketch of the 
 mocking-bird, written over a hundred years 
 ago, graphically describes its dramatic pow- 
 ers and the feeling it exhibits while singing : 
 ' ' It thrills to its own voice, and accompanies 
 it with measured movements that are always 
 suited to the inexhaustible variety of its 
 phrases, natural and acquired. Its usual 
 prelude is to lift itself at first little by little, 
 its wings outspread, then to fall, head down- 
 ward, to its place again; and, after going 
 through this bizarre exercise for some time, 
 it begins its time-keeping movements, or, if 
 you please, its dance, according with the 
 different parts of its song. If it utters bright 
 and airy warblings, its wings at the same 
 time describe a multitude of circles that cross 
 themselves in the air ; one sees it thread the 
 ins and outs of a tortuous line, through which 
 it ceaselessly ascends and descends. If its 
 throat flings out a brilliant and sharply 
 quavered cadence, it accompanies it with 
 wing-strokes equally lively and smart." I 
 suppose that Buffon described all this from 
 hearsay, but it is quite as accurate as any- 
 thing else I have found in his works. As a 
 matter of fact, many of our song-birds are 
 consummate actors, within narrow limits, 
 and have a command of gesture that any 
 opera-star might well covet. The compari- 
 son between the mocking-bird and any other 
 oscine species must be cut short, however, 
 when it comes to the denouement the final 
 outcome of the song for it is here that our 
 American nightingale is incomparable. In 
 6 
 
82 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 speaking of this, Buff on says: "When it 
 gives full freedom to its voice in bursts 
 wherein the sounds are at first full and bril- 
 liant, then softening down by degrees, and 
 finally dying out and losing themselves alto- 
 gether in a silence as charming as the rarest 
 melody, then it is that one sees it hover 
 gently above its perch, slowly slackening the 
 motion of its wings, and resting quiet at last, 
 as if suspended in mid-air." But I have seen 
 it go far beyond even this extraordinary per- 
 formance, and slowly fall to the ground, 
 panting, and apparently exhausted from the 
 effect of its ecstatic climax of exertion. Dur- 
 ing many visits to the coast of the Gulf of 
 Mexico in the spring, I have availed myself 
 of ample opportunity to study this Shakes- 
 peare of the birds, and I have concluded, 
 from what I think sufficient proof, that the 
 mocking-bird sings, consciously at times, 
 for the purpose of gaining the favor of man. 
 One thing is easily noted : Its song, sung close 
 to human habitations in the vines and or- 
 chards and gardens of man's planting is not 
 the same song it sings in the wild depths of 
 the Southern woods. I was so struck with 
 this that I put it to the test in every way I 
 could, and I got so familiar with the differ- 
 ence that, while wandering in the lonely 
 forests, I could know when I was nearing a 
 settler's clearing or a negro's cabin by the 
 peculiar notes of the mocking-birds. All 
 along the charming gulf-coast from Mobile to 
 Bay St. Louis, or, in the other direction, to St. 
 Mark's and Tallahassee, there is not a cot, no 
 matter how lonely or lowly, provided it has 
 a fig-tree, that there is not a pair of mocking- 
 birds to do it honor. The Scuppernong 
 vineyards, too, are the concert-halls of this 
 
MOTIF OF BIRD SONG. 83 
 
 famous singer. Near the home of Mr. Jeffer- 
 son Davis, and, I believe, upon the estate of 
 the ex-Confederate chieftain, I sat in the 
 shade of a water-oak and heard a mocking- 
 bird sing, over in a thrifty vineyard, the rare 
 dropping-song of which naturalists appear to 
 have taken no notice. It was a balmy day in 
 March; the sky, the gulf, the air all hazy 
 and shimmering, the whole world swimming 
 in a purplish mist of dreams, and I felt that 
 the song was the expression of some such 
 sweet passionate longing as exhales from 
 Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale. 1 ' Under the 
 low-hanging boughs, and over the level, 
 daisy-sprinkled ground, I gazed upon the 
 sheeny reach of water, half convinced that I 
 was looking through 
 
 " Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," 
 
 and the very tones of the bird's voice ac- 
 corded with the feeling in which the day was 
 steeped. 
 
 Genuine bird-song is simply the highest 
 form of avian vocalization, by which instinc- 
 tively, if not premeditatedly, the bird finds 
 expression of pleasure. The absence of true 
 rhythm probably is significant of a want of 
 power to appreciate genuine music, the bird's 
 comprehension compassing no more than the 
 value of sweet sounds merely as such. 
 
 As to the origin of bird-song, it has come, 
 it seems to me, in response to a growth of the 
 natural desire for a means of expression. 
 Language is the highest mode of expression, 
 and bird-song is a beautiful and witching, 
 but very imperfect, language. Tn this con- 
 nection it is a striking fact that all the most 
 gifted avian singers are small. The nightin- 
 
84 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 gale and the mocking-bird are insignificant 
 physically, when compared with the ostrich, 
 the condor, and the crane. The entire skull 
 of the mocking-bird is no larger than the end 
 of one's thumb, and its brain will weigh 
 about one-quarter of an ounce. No great 
 scope of intelligence could be expected in 
 such a case; but we must admit that, in a 
 slender way, this brain is amazingly devel- 
 oped and balanced, and that, compared with 
 man's, it is proportionately the more power- 
 ful and under far better control. If a quar- 
 ter-ounce brain can shape a bird-voice so as 
 to captivate the imagination of man through- 
 out the ages, what ought a brain of ninety- 
 two cubic inches do with an equal opportu- 
 nity ? Like the musician of old, it should set 
 the very trees to dancing. 
 
THE GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 BIRD-SONG is one of the most charming 
 mysteries in nature; it has no counter- 
 part in art. I have at times fancied there 
 was some analogy between it and the art of 
 poetry, but there is none, in fact. The genesis 
 of poetry is intellectual and psychal; the 
 genesis of bird-song is purely physical. Even 
 the human voice, in song, oratory, and his- 
 trionic declamation, borrows much of its best 
 value from the character, mental and psychal, 
 of the individual vocalizer. 
 
 The song apparatus of the bird is, perhaps, 
 no more a machine than that of the man; 
 but the controlling force, the motor, of the 
 former is mechanical, whilst that of the latter 
 is intellectual to a large degree. Of course I 
 do not mean to say that birds sing involun- 
 tarily or without emotion of a certain sort, 
 nor would I be understood as representing 
 the song organ of any oscine to be absolutely 
 unadjustable, which would be contrary to 
 the first law of evolution, the natural im- 
 pulse of progression from lower to higher 
 expression. It would seem that conscious 
 effort to improve, such as man is capable of, 
 works both evil and good in the way of devel- 
 oping the vocal organs, whilst the uncon- 
 scious practice indulged by the birds never 
 injures the voice, and if it improves it, the 
 result comes about by the slow process of 
 hereditary accumulation. Thus, no doubt, 
 the wonderful voice power of our song-birds 
 85 
 
86 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 is the result of a long, steady evolutionary 
 growth. 
 
 The theory that birds have descended from 
 a remote reptilian ancestry has so many facts 
 to support it that, until some convincing dis- 
 coveries in paleontology shall be made to 
 the contrary tending, we must accept it as 
 probably true. Unfortunately, the study of 
 comparative anatomy is both infinitely com- 
 plicated and immeasurably dry to the lay- 
 man, as contradistinguished from the 
 scientist, wherefore much the greater num- 
 ber of even cultured people will probably al 
 ways rest in ignorance of the startling 
 details pertaining to evolution in nature. 
 Few of us, indeed, have the time and the 
 necessary self-devotion, even if the scarce 
 and precious material furnished by nature 
 were always at hand, to make the investiga- 
 tions necessary to a high knowledge of nat- 
 ural science. Large museums are far apart, 
 scientific books are expensive, and the field of 
 each science is as wide as the whole range of 
 nature: consequently, none but the favored 
 or the self -de voted few can afford the luxury 
 of following, as Darwin and Huxley and 
 Milne-Edwards and Owen and Marsh have 
 done, the flitting spirit which beckons us 
 back and back, over the silent, desolate 
 grave-yards of the ages, to the beginnings of 
 things. Still, we may all catch a light breath, 
 so to speak, of the air from the oldest, or 
 rather the youngest, period of organic life. 
 Any one of us may choose a slight, narrow, 
 but far-reaching current of inquiry, and float 
 down it, from time to time, until at last the 
 end is reached, .away back in the chaos upon 
 which moved the Spirit of Creation at the 
 dawn of day. 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD SONG. g? 
 
 Some years ago I was tramping and sketch- 
 ing in the beautiful hilly region of Western 
 Florida. During the spring-time, especially, 
 I spent a great deal of my leisure studying 
 the song and habits of the mocking-bird. One 
 morning, while a fine moquer, as the Creoles 
 call our king of song-birds, was charming me 
 with his Wonderful vocalization, the question 
 arose in my mind : When did a mocking-bird 
 first sing ? Of course the inquiry could not 
 be answered ; but it suggested a broad field of 
 special research. Why not ask of Nature 
 the general question, When did birds first 
 sing ? or : What is the genesis of bird-song ? 
 I lay in the shade of a wide-topped live-oak 
 and brooded over the fascinating problem, 
 while a sweet breeze from the Gulf stirred 
 the sprays overhead, and rippled the silvery 
 bosom of a little lake that lapped the sand at 
 my feet. Gradually enough I formulated a 
 plan of investigation which I have followed, 
 as far as my ability to profit by my own dis- 
 coveries and those of others has permitted. 
 
 At first thought it may seem trivial to pro- 
 pose an inquiry into the origin of bird- song; 
 but a little reflection upon the subject will be 
 sufficient to enlist the interest of almost any 
 mind. All things have had a beginning, and 
 so there was a time when no music of 
 " swelling throats " filled the air of spring. 
 Somewhere the first cat-bird sang in a brier- 
 tangle, the first brown thrush flooded a 
 thicket with its melody, the first mocking- 
 bird filled the day and night with incompar- 
 able rhapsody ; at least one imagines as much ; 
 and then the Garden of Eden appears in the 
 distance, some six or seven thousand years 
 away. There it was that birds and bird-song 
 had their beginning, just in time to welcome 
 
88 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 Adam and give Eve a brilliant wedding 
 serenade. 
 
 Now I believe that, when they are read 
 aright, science and revelation, so far as they 
 pertain to material things, are mathemati- 
 cally equivalent to each other ; they coincide 
 in meaning, if not in form. They might bo 
 exactly superposable, were science reduced to 
 the simplicity of revelation, that is to simple 
 truth ; but unfortunately we cannot begin at 
 the beginning or go to the end of science. 
 Revelation states a fact, whilst science merely 
 collects evidence tending to establish a fact. 
 Revelation emits simple truth ; science strives 
 to reach this same elementary verity by a 
 process of reconstruction. 
 
 The inspired record declares that man was 
 given dominion, which would imply that the 
 earth and all things upon it and in it were 
 made for his benefit. Science may profit by 
 this view of creation, and take the serving of 
 man's physical and mental needs as the end 
 of evolution. In other words, we may as- 
 sume that if the object of creation was to 
 make a sphere for man's dominion while in 
 the human state, then all the lines of creature 
 development have been drawn towards a 
 culmination, have been led to their highest 
 point, in the age of man's creation ; that the 
 Creator perfected the animal, mineral, and 
 vegetable kingdoms before he made man. 
 But what has all this to do with the genesis 
 of bird -song ? you will ask. Perhaps much, 
 perhaps little. Let us see. 
 
 Without resorting to the language of tech- 
 nical scientific literature, where it can be 
 avoided, I will briefly review the records of 
 geology touching the origin of birds, and by 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 89 
 
 this means we may get a clew to the origin of 
 bird-song. 
 
 The first traces in the paleozoic rocks of 
 anything resembling bird life are well-defined 
 footprints; these, however, have been at- 
 tributed to certain ancient reptiles having 
 feet approaching those of some aquatic fowls 
 in form. Next come organic remains frag- 
 mentary skeletons, for the most part, of 
 strange saurians and bat-like flying animals, 
 having membranous wings and the beak 
 of a toothed bird. No sign of a feather was 
 observable, however, among all the fossil 
 records, up to the discovery of an imperfect 
 skeleton and partial cast of a strange creature 
 named Archceopteryx, half bird, half reptile, 
 in the lithographic slate of Solenhofen, 
 Bavaria. A transition state between the bat- 
 like, bird-billed reptiles above noted and our 
 present ornithic forms could not be better ex- 
 pressed than by Archseopteryx, so far as 
 anatomy and exterior structural points are 
 concerned. This initial bird, so to call it, ap- 
 pears to have possessed a very oddly arranged 
 suit of feathers, consisting of retrices (ar- 
 ranged regularly on the sides of a very long, 
 twenty- jointed tail) and wing-feathers, its 
 body having no plumage, probably, or at 
 best mere rudimentary, down-like feathers. 
 As to whether this rude bird had a voice, it 
 is useless to inquire, since the head and ster- 
 num are wanting ; but I think we may safely 
 doubt the existence of more than the ob- 
 scurest development of vocal organs in birds 
 having toothed reptile jaws and by-concave 
 vertebrae, as in the case of some of the Odon- 
 tornithes, so ably studied and arranged by 
 Professor Marsh. The fish-eating birds of 
 our own time have not much voice, as a rule, 
 
90 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 a guttural squawk, or a metallic clanging 
 scream, being the extent of their performance. 
 Taking the skeleton of Hesperornis regalis, 
 as restored by Marsh, we shall see at once, 
 considering the toothed jaws and reptilian 
 throat, that its vocal organs were probably 
 far inferior to those of existing loons and 
 grebes, if it had a voice at all. 
 
 Eeturning to Archseopteryx, we shall be- 
 come more and more convinced, the more we 
 study its remains in the light of all that is 
 known of comparative anatomy, that it was 
 scarcely more ornithic than our common bat, 
 as regards similarity 10 the birds of to-day, 
 notwithstanding its feathers. Indeed, it had 
 a sort of bat claw at the end of the wing, and 
 its wing feathers and retrices were a very lit- 
 tle remove from the leathery, bat vans of the 
 flying reptiles in so far as efficiency was con- 
 cerned ; but its impression in the rocks regis- 
 ters a definite effort of nature in the direction 
 of evolving a true bird. Thenceforward we 
 may look for feathered forms gradually 
 growing toward the high type of to-day. The 
 reptile prototype has somehow exchanged his 
 scales for feathers ; the generation of the true 
 bird has begun with Archseopteryx. A long, 
 dreary blank here appears in the record of the 
 rocks, after which we find the toothed birds 
 of Professor Marsh, probably full-fledged, 
 in the sense of being coated with feathers. It 
 is to be doubted whether any of these were 
 good flyers, some of them certainly could 
 not fly at all, though they were mostly ex- 
 cellent swimmers, and possibly capable of liv- 
 ing a long time under water, if not really am- 
 phibious. What Professor Marsh says of the 
 anatomy of Archaeopteryx may be applied 
 generally to the toothed birds : ' ' The bones 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 91 
 
 of the reptile are indeed there, but they have 
 already received the stamp of the bird: 51 and 
 I may add that, as regards Odontornithes 
 collectively, the feathers are indeed there, 
 and the stamp of the bird, but the old reptile 
 character is still present, scarcely more than 
 dominated by the ornithic features. I have 
 said that it may be doubted whether any of 
 the Odontornithes were good flyers. By good 
 flyers I mean not merely strong flyers (like 
 the teals) , nor sailers ( like the hawks and 
 buzzards), but flyers whose movements in 
 the air are almost instantaneous, like the 
 highest type of oscines, say the mocking-bird, 
 or the cardinal grossbeak, a facility of flight 
 absolutely necessary to arboreal life, where 
 so many thorns, spikes, branches, twigs, vines, 
 and sprays have to be suddenly avoided in 
 the midst of the swiftest motion. Some of the 
 toothed birds of Marsh's smaller group may 
 have been as good flyers as our gulls, strong 
 and tireless ; but they could not dodge a dozen 
 twigs in a second, as I have seen a sparrow 
 do in full flight. 
 
 The discovery of Palceospiza bella, a well- 
 preserved, almost complete skeleton of a spar- 
 row-like bird in the insectivorous shale of 
 Colorado, has given us the nearest approach 
 to a song-bird yet found in the old rocks ; but 
 the bill is lacking. Most probably Palaeospiza 
 was an oscine, in the ornithological sense, but 
 I think we may well doubt whether it could 
 sing, in the true meaning of the word. Its 
 position in the insect-bearing shale further 
 favors our classing it as insectivorous, an- 
 other characteristic of the true song-birds; 
 but this would not give it a song, for many 
 of the existing oscines have no song to sing, 
 chirp and pipe and squeak as they may. 
 
92 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 From this slight sketch of what the old 
 rocks tell about birds, we see that, so far as 
 fossil remains teach anything, they teach us 
 that the oscine form was the last to appear in 
 the succession of structural changes in the 
 bird's general physique. This is as far as we 
 can go in the direction of mere development 
 of form, by the light of anatomy, considering 
 fossil skeletons merely as such. 
 
 Let us turn r w and take a quick glance 
 over the evident :>f voice development dis- 
 coverable in the kinship between birds and 
 reptiles. 
 
 Professor Huxley, in one of the most ad- 
 mirable of his great contributions to scien- 
 tific taxonomy, has classed the birds and the 
 reptiles together, or rather grouped them un- 
 der one head, as constituting- a primary divi- 
 sion of the vertebrates. He has based this 
 classification on many points in which, on one 
 hand, birds and reptiles agree anatomically 
 and physiologically, and on their variance 
 from mammals in as many points on the 
 other hand. Indeed, the kinship between 
 birds and reptiles is still very strong, even af- 
 ter the immense development of the bird form 
 and the comparatively slight modification of 
 most reptile forms which have come about 
 since the time of Archseopteryx and the dino- 
 saurian animals of the triassic rocks. 
 
 We may assume, then, that the develop- 
 ment of the vocal organs in birds has been, in 
 some measure, apace with or dependent upon 
 the departure of the bird form from that of 
 the reptile. 
 
 Our present existing reptiles are almost de- 
 void of voice proper. Some of them can make 
 certain dismal, guttural groans or croaks, 
 others can utter shrill, discordant sounds; 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 93 
 
 but at best the reptilian vocal apparatus is 
 rudimentary in the extreme. Hence in those 
 days when the bird was just struggling away 
 from the clumsiest and worst hindering char- 
 acteristics of the reptile, it certainly possessed 
 no vocal organs of any great power. It would 
 appear doubtful whether it had any at all, 
 since so few birds, even now, have a singing 
 voice, and since, after all these ages of devel- 
 opment, the reptile's voice is scarcely a voice 
 at best. It is a curious fact that frogs and 
 toads, amphibians, have the best developed vo- 
 cal organs of all the reptiles, and that they are 
 not properly scale-bearing ; and yet it is from 
 the scale-bearing reptiles that our birds have 
 sprung. Perhaps the common toad comes 
 nearer than any known reptile to the posses- 
 sion of a singing voice, though the tree-frogs 
 have a peculiar chirp or squeak not unlike 
 certain notes of the woodpeckers. One might 
 stop here and indulge the pretty impression 
 that the toad in the summer grass and the 
 tree-frog among the green branches register 
 the highest possibilities of reptilian song 
 genius, whilst the mocking-bird, the brown 
 thrush, and the nightingale assert the tri- 
 umph of the race which long ago departed 
 from the groove of that lower estate, by 
 changing scales to feathers, legs to wings, and 
 that rudimentary vocal apparatus into the 
 syrinx, with which to charm the poets of all 
 time! 
 
 The crocodiles, including our alligator, have 
 the tongue attached all round in the mouth, 
 so that it cannot be much used, and it is at 
 this point, so far as the power of vocalization 
 is concerned, that song-birds have departed 
 farthest from the scale-bearing reptiles; for 
 the tongues of our musical oscines are thor- 
 
94 SYLVAN SECEETS. 
 
 oughly liberated, and do good service in the 
 complicated gymnastics of song production. 
 The tongue of the frog is, as a rule, attached 
 at the front of the mouth and free behind, so 
 that, in catching insects, this organ is " curled 
 over itself," and thrust out rear end foremost. 
 Curiously enough, the " singing " tree-frogs 
 are the males, the females not possessing the 
 vocal power to any great degree ; thus resem- 
 bling our oscines, whose males are the music- 
 makers. Moreover, the frog, as a fossil, dates 
 back to the time when the birds were fairly 
 beginning to separate themselves from reptile 
 life. Add to this the fact that there is a flying 
 tree-frog in Borneo, and it will be seen that 
 here is a strange, belated effort of nature to 
 urge the scaleless reptiles up to arboreal, 
 aerial, and song-singing life, by the side of 
 their more fortunate avian kinsmen, who 
 early chose a better method of develop- 
 ment! 
 
 Turning now to rapidly sketch the really 
 wonderful vocal organs of our oscine birds, 
 I need not enter into any technical anatomi- 
 cal discussion, but, taking the mocking-bird 
 as the highest type of singer, it will be suffi- 
 cient, for the purposes of this paper, to ex- 
 plain the salient features of the song-produc- 
 ing throat in birds. First, then, all bird-song 
 is generated in a lower larynx called the 
 syrinx, a complicated little machine situated, 
 in fact, at the lower end of the trachea, 
 where it divides into two bronchial tubes, 
 and consisting in chief of an enlargement and 
 rearrangement of the compound lower ring 
 of the windpipe, a bony cross-bar, orpessulus, 
 and a membranous plate which forms a par- 
 tition between the tubes, and whose upper 
 margin is one of the vibrating vocal cords, 
 
GENESIS OF BIBD-SONG. 95 
 
 the other cord being a membrane developed 
 on the inside of the bronchial rings, or rather 
 half-rings, opposite the septum or partition 
 above mentioned. Thus a column of air 
 passing from the lungs to escape through the 
 trachea sets these membranes to vibrating, 
 whilst by means of five or six pairs of deli- 
 cately adjusted muscles the air space is 
 changed with wonderful facility, the column 
 shortened or lengthened, as is done by the 
 flute-player, and indeed the whole lower 
 throat becomes a generator of sweet sounds, 
 which, passing up to the bird's mouth, are 
 broken into melodious bits, so to speak, and 
 scattered to the winds; for the highest vo- 
 calization, although generated in the syrinx, 
 is made into song, in a large degree, by the 
 bird's tongue, its posterior mouth walls, and 
 the upper extremity of the trachea, all of 
 which taken together constitute a compli- 
 cated and perfectly adjusted governor of the 
 quantity, the accent, and, in a measure, the 
 quality of the notes. 
 
 Every observer has remarked that nearly 
 all the superior songsters among birds have 
 rather long and slender bills, whilst the talk- 
 ers have short, stout ones. I have tried to 
 discover, and think I have discovered, the 
 relation that width, length, and curvature of 
 bill have to the quality or style of voice. It 
 is sufficient to remark here that birds having 
 extremely short, thick .beaks, like that of the 
 cardinal grossbeak or that of the blue-jay, 
 have not the power, apparently, of trilling, 
 shaking, or quavering the voice (which is the 
 distinguishing gift of the thrush and many 
 other slender-billed birds), though the gross- 
 beak and the jay have excellent vocal pow- 
 ers. Eeduced to a rule, the comparison will 
 
96 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 be, The short-bills twitter and whistle, the 
 long-bills sing. The blue-jay is the most 
 melodious of the whistlers, whilst the quail 
 (bob-white) and the cardinal grossbeak are 
 the most powerful whistlers of all our birds. 
 
 It has been somewhat taken for granted by 
 our ornithologists that all the birds belong- 
 ing to the subdivision named oscines, or sing- 
 ers, have the vocal organs necessary to song. 
 Even Dr. Coues remarks that the rook, 
 though "a corvine croaker," has a "syrinx 
 in good order, though he has never learned 
 to play " on it . Now, I have never had the 
 opportunity of dissecting a rook's vocal or- 
 gans ; but I am able to say that such corvine 
 croakers as I have examined are not pos- 
 sessed of a song-making apparatus to be at 
 all compared with that of the cat-bird, the 
 brown thrush, or the mocking-bird. MacgiJ- 
 livray's figures will have to be greatly mod- 
 ified when applied to the best of our Ameri- 
 can songsters. Professor Muller's researches 
 in the comparative anatomy of vocal organs 
 in birds, and Professor Huxley's admirably 
 clear description, have failed fully to recog- 
 nize the office of the tongue and posterior 
 walls of the mouth in differentiating and 
 modifying the notes of a bird's song. It ap- 
 pears to me that the oversight, or partial 
 oversight, has arisen from taking it for 
 granted that the bronchi- tracheal syrinx is 
 the absolute and sole song organ in birds, in- 
 stead of being merely the voice generator in 
 song-birds. For example, the parrot has no 
 septum in his syrinx, and but three pairs of 
 intrinsic muscles, and yet his voice is a won- 
 der of flexibility and elasticity. Melody is 
 lacking, because one of the vocal cords (the 
 septum with its mnmbrn.no) is gone; but high 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 9? 
 
 vocal performance is possible, because the 
 lower mouth space and the tongue are singu- 
 larly adapted to modifying and breaking up 
 the voice into fragments surprisingly articu- 
 late, though the voice itself is inferior in 
 timbre and range. 
 
 Long before I began my dissections, I had 
 noted that the sweetest of the flute notes ut- 
 tered by the mocking-bird and the blue- jay 
 appeared to be blown out through a rigidly 
 distended throat, whilst the delicately qua- 
 vered passages of the mocking-bird's song 
 were, seemingly, manufactured at the root 
 of the tongue. To get evidence of this, care- 
 fully watch your caged mocker when he is 
 delivering a labored staccato combination, 
 and you will see the convulsive shake of the 
 mouth muscles and the peculiar management 
 of the lower mouth space, by which he differ- 
 entiates the notes. On the other hand, he 
 will whistle, and when he has ended you can 
 scarcely say whether or not he opened or 
 moved his mouth at all during the perform- 
 ance. 
 
 There is an interesting ventriloquial effect 
 produced by the purely syringeal or laryn- 
 geal notes of a bird's voice. This is very 
 pronounced in the call of the quail, and es- 
 pecially in the piping of young wild turkeys ; 
 but it is most noteworthy in some of the 
 night-cries of the mocking-bird. True song, 
 however, has nothing of this peculiarity in it ; 
 even the careless shadow lay of the indigo- 
 bird has its definite expression of place and 
 distance, no matter how sketchy its outline. 
 
 From all we can gather it appears most 
 probable that in its present form our song- 
 bird proper our bird with a song to sing is 
 not much older than man ; that he found his 
 
98 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 song just in time to gladden the ears of God's 
 last and greatest creation ; that he struggled 
 through countless ages and awful changes in 
 order to fit himself for our entertainment. 
 Think what the avian race has endured since 
 first Archseopteryx felt the feathers begin to 
 bud in his arms ! What a long, slow, hesitat- 
 ing, faltering current of development, from a 
 scaly amphibian of the paleozoic time, up, 
 up, to the glorious state of the nightingale 
 and the mocking-bird ! I never see a brown 
 thrush flashing his brilliant song from the 
 highest spray of a tree without letting a 
 thought go back over the way he has come 
 to us, and I always feel that to protect and 
 defend the song-bird is one of man's clearest 
 duties. Indeed, nothing is better indicated 
 by the records of the ages than that beautiful 
 colors, rich fragrance, and bird-song were 
 made especially for us. There were no 
 flowers, properly so called, in paleozoic 
 times. Amidst all the luxuriant vegetation 
 of fhe coal measures, not a fossil blossom is 
 found, nor do the rocks give up a single but- 
 terfly or other insect which was probably 
 highly or delicately colored. The ancient 
 birds (reasoning from analogy) were not gay- 
 feathered, and, as I have shown, were not 
 able to sing. But when man appeared the 
 world was ready for him ; the hills and the 
 valleys and the broad plains were covered 
 with verdure and bloom, and the air was rich 
 with perfume and resonant with bird-song. 
 He might have looked around scarcely able 
 to know whether the butterflies were winged 
 flowers, or the flowers vegetable butterflies. 
 All this great, riant, blooming, perfumed, 
 Tnusic-filled world was for him and his beau 
 tiful companion. Well might it be said that 
 
GENESIS OF BIRD-SONG. 99 
 
 they were in a garden, an Eden. Well might 
 the gush of song from a myriad swelling 
 throats, around, above, everywhere, suggest 
 that the very stars of morning were singing 
 together. 
 
 I am inclined to the belief, from my own 
 observation, that many of our birds are still 
 in a transition state as regards the develop- 
 ment of their vocal organs. Take the wood- 
 peckers, a very unmusical family, and we 
 shall find the golden-wing giving some evi- 
 dence of acquiring a song, apace with his 
 departure from the true woodpecker habit. 
 The wood-thrush appears to lack a million 
 years or so of practice and hereditary devel- 
 opment to make him sing as well as the 
 mocking-bird, though his voice is as sweet as 
 a silver bell. The meadow-lark is very nearly 
 a singer, so is the bluebird, whilst the blue- 
 iay sloes at rare intervals render a low, mel- 
 low, incomparably pure flute passage, as if 
 whistling a snatch from a future score of its 
 own. The* tufted tit-mouse stops just short 
 of what one fancies would be a fine, clear lay, 
 and the cardinal grossbeak puts on all the 
 airs of an accomplished musician, without 
 being quite able to find a tune. 
 
 Comparative anatomy bears out these sug- 
 gestions, showing that development of voice 
 , in birds runs quite along with the develop- 
 ment of the syrinx, whilst development of 
 song power keeps well up with and is depend- 
 ent on the correlative efficiency of the syrinx 
 and mouth arrangement. No crow, or black- 
 bird (American), or other songless oscine is 
 capable of learning to sing, nor can it be, un- 
 til a change shall have taken place, not in its 
 larynx or syrinx, but in the shape of the pos- 
 terior part of its mouth with relation to its 
 
100 SYLVAN SECRETS. 
 
 tongue and the opening of the trachea. In 
 every case where a bird approaches the mar- 
 gin of song-making it will be found to possess 
 a mouth arrangement superior to that of birds 
 which have no tendency toward song. Even 
 the mouth and tongue of the golden- winged 
 woodpecker are verging in the direction of 
 the true development; its bill is growing 
 slender and weak, is taking on the song-bird 
 curve, and the posterior part of the tongue is 
 being modified. Indeed, Colaptes auratus is 
 much nearer the true singing bird's estate 
 than any rook, no matter how beautifully de- 
 veloped its syiinx, but it is not nearer the 
 possession of the greatest vocal power, the 
 power of articulate expression. 
 
 Such is a hasty glimpse of the genesis of 
 bird-song, a subject which might well have a 
 volume devoted to it ; for so long as Keat's 
 ode to a nightingale and Shelley's to a sky-lark 
 shall exist, no one dare say that bird-song is 
 not worthy of the highest attention. 
 
THE 
 
 ANATOMY OF BIKD-SONG. 
 
 THE vocal organs of the birds have received 
 much attention from the comparative anato 
 mists, and have been the subject of many 
 theories, accompanied with more or less figur- 
 ing and minute description. Ms cgillivray hat 
 been followed pretty closely by all the bird 
 anatomists since he wrote his British Birds, 
 and especially has his exposition of the office 
 and modus operandi of the so-called syrina 
 been accepted as if without question Pet 
 haps the best work yet done in this field so fa 
 as it goes (and outside of Macgillivray's) i* 
 Miiller's Researches, Berlin Ac. 1845, though 
 Owen and Parker and Huxley, not to mention 
 a great many others, have touched the subject 
 with deft hands in passing by. As a rule, 
 however, and naturally enough, the attention 
 of all these competent scientists has been 
 directed more particularly to the anatomical 
 side of the subject, to the neglect, in some 
 degree at least, of the physiological side. The 
 syrinx, a peculiar valve-box attached to and 
 forming a specialized part of the oscine larynx, 
 has been described over and over again, and 
 song-making assigned as its function. Curi- 
 ously enough, Macgillivray's famous drawings 
 the figures upon which everybody has been 
 content to rely for so many years were 
 made from a rook, a bird without a singing 
 voice, though possessed of what is called the 
 typical oscine syrinx. 
 
 Some years ago, while dissecting, a meadow- 
 lark I became sceptical upon the subject of the 
 
102 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 bird-voice being formed or originated in the 
 syrinx. I admit that my doubt had no scien- 
 tific basis at first, for it was suggested by the 
 feeble and insignificant appearance of the 
 organ, but it bore upon my mind with suffi- 
 cient weight to send me back to the books for a 
 re-study of the subject. There were Macgil- 
 livray's figures again, drawn from the larynx 
 and syrinx of the rook, a typical oscine, and 
 there was Professor Huxley's singularly clear 
 description, accepted by everybody. But the 
 doubt had got into my mind unbidden and it 
 would not obey when I ordered it out. So I 
 set about making original investigations, 
 which have taken much time and covered a 
 great deal more ground than I intended, and 
 which, nevertheless, are yet far from complete. 
 I began by making first a thorough study of 
 the construction of the oscine larynx from 
 specimens collected by myself. In doing this 
 I took from various species the larynx and 
 syrinx with the tongue attached, and com- 
 pared them in every way, making minutely 
 copious notes and sketches as I went along. 
 Next I dissected these members with a view 
 to becoming certainly familiar with their 
 structure and with their mode of action inde- 
 pendently and correlatively . At the same 
 time every anatomical feature of the bird's 
 mouth was studied and experimented upon 
 with full sketches and notes. As an aid to 
 my investigations with knife, needle, and 
 microscope, I patiently and closely watched 
 caged birds while singing, and with a powerful 
 field-glass gave wild birds the same attention 
 during their lyrical performances. 
 
 It may not be out of place to state that in 
 the course of all these studies I made journeys 
 which, taken together, have covered a large 
 part of the territory east .of the Mississippi 
 River and west of the Alleghany Mountains' 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 103 
 
 and between Lake Superior and the Gulf of 
 Mexico. My work has been prosecuted every 
 month of the year, and my birds have been o( 
 every age from nestlings up, and while I have 
 taken the syrinx and other members of the 
 vocal organ from the male rather than from 
 the female, still I have not neglected the 
 latter. 
 
 Finally, as a part of my self-appointed task, 
 I have examined by every method I could 
 command, the voice qualities possessed by our 
 song-birds. This last I consider of importance 
 in view of the fact that a difference in voice 
 quality naturally suggests a difference of 
 some degree in the development of the vocal 
 organs. The timbre, or, for that matter, any 
 quality of bird-voice varies as much between 
 species as does the appearance of any notable 
 physical feature, whilst among the true sing- 
 ers there is no appreciable difference of 
 syrinx-development, so far as my examina- 
 tions have disclosed, but of this in the proper 
 place. 
 
 If the question arise, and I must answer 
 why I have made this study, I shall deem it 
 enough for me to say that I had to do it. The 
 subject took hold of me and would not be 
 shaken off. The birds, singly, in wisps, and in 
 clamorous mobs, assaulted me with their 
 melodious missiles, and taunted me with the 
 mystery of their song-power. In the dark 
 woods of the Middle West, along the shores 
 of the Northern lakes, in the blooming thick- 
 ets of the Florida peninsula, in the swamps of 
 the Creole country, and all through the pictur- 
 esque hill region of Alabama, Georgia, the 
 Carolinas, and Tennessee, they had jeered 
 at me, laughed at me, scolded me, and 
 whistled me to scorn, and then, to com- 
 plete my perplexity, they had sung me to 
 sleep and sung me awake with delicate and 
 
104 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 delicious phrases as new and fresh as dew, 
 and yet as old as the sea. I could not get rid 
 of them, even when I shut myself in my 
 study. If I turned to the poets, there were 
 the nightingale and the dove, the mavis, the 
 eky-lark and the oriole singing away for dear 
 life; from the preludes to Greek folk-songs 
 and from the ballads of the love-sick Proven- 
 gal tramp, or from the roundel of the steel-clad 
 knight as he rode along the dusty highway 
 with the Rhone on one hand and the vine- 
 yards on the other, I heard the bird-notes 
 bubble out to mingle with the tinkle of cith- 
 ern and the quaver of hautbois. The orators, 
 the essayists, the preachers, and all the tribes 
 of romancers brought me echoes of sylvan 
 fluting. Then if I turned to the pages of 
 science and rushed to the extreme of "solid 
 reading," I fared no better; for even the rec- 
 ords ef geology eulogized the birds, and I 
 heard strange twitterings of avian voices 
 trickling like spring-streams out of the an- 
 cient rocks. Not less in the books than in 
 the woods and fields was bird-song tantaliz- 
 ing, for at every point some subtle and elusive 
 suggestion arose, only to escape final analysis. 
 Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale blows 
 through his words something inexpressible 
 which haunts and taunts the understanding 
 like a half -forgotten strain of dream music, 
 and the same mysterious challenge to one's 
 soul exhales from the strange inscriptions 
 sketched in the deep-buried stones of aeons 
 ago, where the fragments of vanished bird- 
 forms hint of unknowable life-forces dried up 
 long before man felt the breath of God. One 
 must say this reverently and with no ques- 
 tion of a clash between Nature and the in- 
 spired record arising in one's mind, for the 
 Bible is not a natural-history book, nor is 
 geology a scheme of salvation. There is no 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 105 
 
 clash between the two. But to the bird- 
 voices that have charmed all manner of men 
 and women, let us turn in the spirit of the 
 truth-seeker, and leave the fools biting the 
 iron spikes of vain contention. There shall 
 be neither vagary nor agnosticism in our per- 
 formances; we will simply look into the 
 birds' mouths, and inquire about their tender 
 flutiiigs, and examine their melodious throats. 
 
 Nor will we indulge in the precious jargon 
 of the sciences, any further than to borrow a 
 few of its most necessary technical words and 
 phrases in case we are hard pressed for a 
 means of lucid expression. 
 
 Study in the fields and woods is so different 
 from study in the library and laboratory, 
 that in writing of it one is apt to forget to 
 respect that dusty, musty air and that 
 skeleton-like stiffness of style so dear to the 
 heart of the closet scientist. After all, how- 
 ever, it is quite probable that there really is 
 nothing in truth which demands or deserves 
 the ill treatment implied by harsh words and 
 unmelodious phrasing. Indeed I sometimes 
 wonder that comparative anatomists are not 
 all poets, like Goethe, or seers, like Emerson. 
 The truths of biology are so perfectly out- 
 lined, and yet so dim, so near, and yet so 
 unreachable, so set in an atmosphere of fasci- 
 nating mystery, so suggestive of inexpressible 
 things hovering just beyond the reach of 
 thought, that the imagination strikes at them, 
 as a bird might strike at its own shining re- 
 flection in a shimmering summer pool. I 
 dare say that one manifestation of life is just 
 as mysterious as any other ; but the mystery 
 of song, having the charm we all know yet 
 cannot explain, is a double mystery. Emer- 
 son understood it well when he exclaimed : 
 
 " Aloft, in secret veins of air, 
 Blows the sweet breath of song 1 " 
 
1 00 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 II. 
 
 In his description of the syrinx, Huxley, 
 taking it for granted that bird-song is gener- 
 ated in that organ, declares: "The voice of 
 birds is not formed in the larynx, but in the 
 eyrinx." 
 
 To understand what is meant by this state- 
 ment, let us examine the anatomy of a typical 
 bird-syrinx. If for this purpose we kill a 
 rook, as did Macgillivray, and proceed to cut 
 out its tongue with the entire tracheal column 
 attached, we shall find that the opening of 
 the trachea is just posterior to the root of the 
 tongue. From this opening, down to where 
 it is divided into two bronchial tubes, the 
 trachea of most song-birds slightly decreases 
 in diameter. At the point of division, how- 
 ever, a peculiar modification of structure 
 takes place. This modification of the trachea 
 is the syrinx, which, viewed exteriorly, is a 
 roundish bundle of muscular fiber covering 
 the bony and cartilaginous frame of the 
 organ, whilst its interior is a delicate but 
 firmly adjusted system of valves. The main 
 body of the tracheal column is an elastic tube 
 of long rings held together by a tough and 
 flexible covering, and furnished with muscles 
 by which it may be shortened or elongated at 
 the will of the bird. 
 
 The glottis, as the opening of the trachea is 
 called, is a slit somewhat elliptical in its 
 general form, set between the barb-like 
 prongs of the hyoid bone. This opening is 
 furnished with a rim of muscle and mem- 
 brane and can be opened, closed, or made to 
 assume a great variety of forms at the bird's 
 will. Immediately over the glottis, in the 
 roof of the bird's mouth is a narrow longi- 
 tudinal groove that in its anterior extremity 
 ips exactly formed to receive the bony tip of 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 107 
 
 the tongue, which in true song-birds thins 
 down to a very delicate degree. All the 
 movements of the glottis are intimately con- 
 nected with those of the tongue, so that the 
 latter organ, as will be seen presently, has 
 much to do with bird-song; indeed it has 
 much more to do with it than has the syrinx. 
 
 Sound, as exemplified in the aviaii voice, is 
 the" vibration of a column of air by an expul- 
 sion of breath from the lungs through the 
 glottis into the mouth cavity. Properly 
 speaking, there is no such thing, as a bird 
 voice in the popular meaning of the word 
 italicised. A bird whistles, chirrups, twit- 
 ters, clucks, croaks, quacks etc. ; but every 
 sound it utters is a wind-note as pure and 
 simple, so far as if!& origin is concerned, as 
 any note of a flute. There is no such thing 
 as a bird's vocal cord. No sound ever had its 
 origin in a bird's so-called syrinx. The vibra- 
 tion of a membrane has nothing whatever to 
 do with creating the sounds uttered by birds, 
 but it may modify and vary the form of 
 those sounds. 
 
 Without appealing to the anatomical evi- 
 dence, which, however, I shall not neglect to 
 do in the proper place, I might suggest some 
 general objections to the syrinx theory. For 
 instance, some of the pure, clear notes uttered 
 by a mocking-bird may be heard, on a favora- 
 ble morning, at a distance of nearly or quite 
 half a mile. The so-called vocal cords of this 
 bird's syrinx are less than the sixteenth of an 
 inch in length, and are stowed in a thickening 
 of the trachea some two inches below its 
 opening. Now how can it be possible for so 
 strong, clear, and pu^e a sound to be generated 
 by so short and feetife a cord, and at the bot- 
 tom of so long and slender a tube ? Let me 
 ask the reader to pause just here and whistle, 
 carefully noting that the sound is created in 
 
108 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 the oval orifice formed for the purpose by the 
 lips, and that the pitch and tone quality are 
 governed by the cavity of the whistler's 
 mouth and throat. In other words, the notes 
 in whistling are caused by the breath from 
 the lungs passing through the opening be- 
 tween the lips, and they are given character by 
 the volume and length of the vibratory col- 
 umn of air in the mouth and trachea of the 
 whistler. Now make a deep cup of your 
 hand and hold it over your mouth while you 
 whistle. You. find by careful experiment 
 that any interference with the column of air 
 in front of the mouth-orifice also curiously 
 modifies the sounds. 
 
 The bird's glottis is the whistling orifice; 
 there the sounds are generated, and their 
 character is controlled by the vibrations of 
 two columns of air, one in the trachea, the 
 other in the cavity of the bird's mouth and 
 throat. The glottis is set in the midst of a 
 tangle of muscles, fibrous tendons, and elastic 
 membranes belonging to itself, the tongue, 
 the mouth, and the throat of the bird. Any 
 movement of the tongue, the throat, or the 
 mandibles of the bird affects the glottis in 
 some degree, so that in the case of the best 
 songsters some of the vocal movements are 
 intricately compound, and consequently the 
 sounds produced are likewise compound, 
 but not in origin, simply in modification. 
 For instance, in the croaking of a yellow- 
 billed cuckoo, the sounds are begun at the 
 glottis and would be clear whistle-notes but 
 for the form assumed by the bird's mouth and 
 throat, and the vibratory reflection caused by 
 the action of the elastic membranes against 
 which the bird's breath impinges as it leaps 
 from the trachea. The fact that the sounds 
 uttered by the crows, the cuckoos, and many 
 other oscines are gutteral in effect has led to 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 109 
 
 gross error in the conclusions arrived at by 
 writers upon the subject of bird-song. The 
 harsh croaking notes, when closely observed, 
 are found actually to begin as if the bird were 
 going to whistle ; but the sounds are arrested 
 by the tongue and mouth-roof, and flung back 
 into the throat, so to speak, where they are 
 distorted, broken, and specialized into a char- 
 acteristic rasping gurgle-phrase, which at a 
 distance is taken for a genuine voice-effect, 
 because of the peculiar jar or vibration of the 
 throat and mouth membranes communicated 
 to the reflected air-column above and posterior 
 to the glottis. 
 
 It is quite the habit of ornithologists to allege 
 that a rook or a shrike has just as good a 
 vocal organ as a mocking-bird or a wood- 
 thrush, and, viewing the syrinx as such 
 organ, doubtless they are right; the error re- 
 sides in the point of view. The very fact that 
 a logger-head shrike with its preposterous 
 rasp- voice has a really larger and better syr- 
 inx than the robin, or the mocking-bird, or 
 any other sweet singer, ought of itself to give 
 rise to some doubt as to whether the voige- 
 organ of the birds has been rightly located by 
 the anatomists. Prof. Huxley's description 
 of the bird-syrinx is admirable in every way ; 
 no one can find fault with it from the anatomi 
 cal point of view ; but he assumes the physi- 
 ological part of the problem, or rather takes 
 the function of the so-called organ as granted 
 without proof. It is clear to my mind that 
 he was led to do this by Macgillivray's brill- 
 iant treatment of the subject, and Parker 
 all but admits that he has submitted to the 
 same influence. Dr. Elliot Coues simply adopts 
 the reasoning and presents the plates of Mac- 
 gillivray's work. Indeed it appears, so far 
 as I know, that no biologist since Macgillivray 
 
110 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 has given the subject thorough analysis at 
 first hand. 
 
 Let us now examine the avian syrinx with 
 a view to settling the question whether or not 
 it is a song-making organ. In doing this we 
 will choose the syrinx of an accomplished 
 singer, so that there may be no doubt in the 
 matter. 
 
 In making my dissections and other studies 
 I began with the mocking-bird and ended 
 with the wood-thrush, branching out between 
 these to take in many birds not singers at all. 
 
 The syrinx of the mocking-bird will serve 
 our purpose just now. 
 
 III. 
 
 The syrinx of the mocking-bird is situated 
 in the cavity of the bird's breast near the 
 upper part of the lungs and it is made up of 
 the following parts : A slight enlargement of 
 the lower rings of the trachea, forming a 
 drum divided internally at its posterior ex- 
 tremity by a bony cross-piece called the pes- 
 sulus, a membranous cartilage rising above 
 the pessulus a little way into the trachea 
 proper, dividing the hollow thereof into 
 halves, and a wisp of delicate muscles. The 
 trachea forks at the lower part of the syrinx 
 into, two bronchial tubes that pass directly to 
 the lungs right and left. 
 
 The reader may get an excellent idea of a 
 mocking-bird's trachea and syrinx by imag- 
 ining for the trachea a hollow large-sized 
 broom-straw an inch and a half in length, one 
 end of which is the glottis, and the other end, 
 slightly enlarged, the syrinx, out of which 
 the bronchial tubes pass at an angle with each 
 other of some fifty degrees. Further, imagine 
 this bifurcated lower end of the broom-straw 
 to be furnished with a valve-like division- 
 wall rising a little way up its hollow, just 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. Ill 
 
 above the point of bifurcation. In other 
 words, imagine the hollow of the syrinx (lower 
 end of the straw) divided into two equal 
 apartments by a thin vertical wall, whilst 
 from each apartment passes a smaller tube 
 just like the trachea (the straw). Such is a 
 general description of what has heretofore 
 been considered the song-organ of the highest 
 kind of bird. I cannot do better, however, 
 than to add here a condensation of the de- 
 tailed description prepared by Prof. Huxley : 
 1st, The trachea is a hollow cylinder formed 
 by bony rings. 2nd, "The hindermost (lowest) 
 rings of the trachea coalesce and form a pe- 
 culiarly arranged chamber immediately be- 
 yond (below) which the bronchi diverge, and 
 from their posterior wall, where one bronchus 
 passes into the other, a vertical fold of the 
 lining membrane rises in the middle towards 
 the tympanum (syrinx chamber) and forms a 
 vertical septum between the anterior aper- 
 tures of the two bronchi. The anterior edg^ 
 of this septum is a free and thin membrana 
 semilunaris, but in its interior a cartilagin- 
 ous or osseus frame is developed and becomes 
 united with the tympanum. The base of this 
 frame sends out two cornua, one along the 
 dorsal, the other along the ventral edge of the 
 inner wall of the bronchus of its side, which 
 in this part of its extent is membranous and 
 elastic, and named the membrana tympani- 
 formis interna. Opposite this the bronchial 
 rings are incomplete, and have the form of 
 arches embracing the outer moiety of the 
 bronchus. The second and third of these 
 bronchial arcs are freely movable, and elastic 
 tissue accumulated upon their inner surfaces 
 gives rise to a fold of the mucous membrane 
 which forms the outer boundary of a cleft, 
 bounded on the inner side by the membrana 
 semilunaris. The air forced through these 
 
112 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 two clefts from the lungs sets these elastic 
 margins vibrating, and thus gives rise to a 
 musical note, the character of which is chiefly 
 determined by the tension of the elastic mar- 
 gins and the length of the tracheal column of 
 air. The muscles by the contraction of which 
 these two factors of the voice are modified, 
 are extrinsic and intrinsic." 
 
 In the case of every true song bird that I 
 have examined there are six pairs of intrin- 
 sic muscles controlling the tympanum and 
 bronchial arcs. By the contraction of these 
 muscles, the arcs and the tympanum are 
 moved in a variety of ways. The mocking- 
 bird, however, has much weaker syrinx mus- 
 cles than the shripe, the cuckoo, or the blue- 
 jay, though if Prof. Huxley's theory of song- 
 generation is correct, the mocking-bird's 
 organ should be much the more powerful in 
 every respect. 
 
 The "fold" of membrane described by 
 Prof. Huxley as occupying the inner surface 
 of the free arcs of each bronchus and the 
 membranous edge of the frame of the pessu- 
 lus are really delicate valves whose function 
 or office is quite different from that assigned 
 to them by the anatomists. 
 
 The minute intrinsic muscles controlling the 
 mocking-bird's syringeal membranous pro- 
 jections are so arranged that the mouths of 
 the bronchial tubes may be almost, if not 
 quite, closed by the extension of the ''folds," 
 or elastic margins, and by this means the 
 bird is enabled to measure in the nicest man- 
 ner the amount of air thrown from the lungs 
 into the trachea. Thus when it is whistling 
 a rapid staccato, the delicately modulated 
 notes following one another like raindrops in 
 a shower, these valves in the syrinx are doling 
 out the air in precisely the right quantities 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 113 
 
 and at exactly the proper intervals for 
 the purpose in view. 
 
 The so-called vocal cords in the syrinx 
 of a blue-bird (Sialia sialis) are less than 
 the twentieth of an inch in greatest ex- 
 tent. Indeed the free membrane of the 
 septum is scarcely discoverable with the 
 naked eye, and yet - the fife-notes of that 
 beautiful bird may be heard far across 
 the summer fields, sweet, clear, mellow 
 as the softest quaver of the flute d' amour, all 
 owing, as the great anatomists would have 
 it, to the vibrations of those deep-set infini- 
 tesimal membranous margins ! 
 
 The chief stumbling-block of all the investi- 
 gators has been that they have taken it for 
 granted that birds have voices like those of 
 the mammals, and that consequently each 
 singer must have a set of vibrating vocal 
 cords somewhere in his breathing tube ; when 
 in fact the avian musician's syrinx has no 
 more need for vocal cords than had the 
 famous syrinx or Pan-pipe of the ancient 
 god. 
 
 Let us again consider the act of whistling. 
 Note the fact that you can run the gamut 
 without perceptible change of the size or shape 
 of the mouth orifice, the sounds being graded 
 by controlling the size of the air column be- 
 hind the orifice. Now, the bird in whistling 
 controls both the size of the orifice and the 
 extent of the air columns above and below 
 the glottis. This gives him a range .and pow- 
 er of expression not to be approached by the 
 human whistler. He can open wide his 
 mouth and whistle, as does the quail, with 
 almost deafening shrillness and penetration, 
 or, closing his bill until a mere slit is seen be- 
 tween the mandibles, he can blow a dreamy 
 hautbois note, slender and refined as ever 
 
114 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 stirred the air of Arcady, or trembled in the 
 vineyards of old Provence. 
 
 But bird-song cannot have its mystery 
 wholly solved by dissection. The parts of the 
 organs are so extremely minute and so ob- 
 scure in their connection and correlation that 
 we must turn to extrinsic and general obser- 
 vations for assistance* in interpreting their 
 functions. With this view, let us go watch 
 a mocking-bird while he sings. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Everybody has noticed how a singing bird 
 expands and compresses its throat just below 
 and between the prongs of the lower mandible 
 during the utterance of its musical phrases. 
 When the notes are keen and shrill, the throat 
 is drawn close, and when a grave passage is 
 blown, the throat is puffed out like that of a 
 toad. This puffing process is not merely a 
 lengthening of the trachea (or tracheal column 
 of air), as Prof. Huxley would have us be- 
 lieve it is ; it is more. The posterior cavity of 
 the mouth is greatly expanded laterally, ver- 
 tically, and longitudinally, so as to form a 
 hollow drum behind the glottis. Into this 
 chamber (lined with tightly drawn mem- 
 branes) the breath from the glottis is reflect- 
 ed by the tongue and the anterior part of the 
 roof of the mouth; there its vibrations are 
 communicated to the largest possible column 
 of air, sounding the gravest notes of the bird's 
 voice. When the throat is compressed, this 
 drum or chamber is reduced to the minimum, 
 and the vibrant column of air gives forth the 
 sharpest sounds possible to the organ. 
 
 Observe the mocking-bird or the brown 
 thrush, as it sings 
 
 " Of summer in full-throated ease," 
 and you will see that the lengthening or short- 
 ening of the tracheal column has but little to 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 115 
 
 do with the relative yalues of the notes. I 
 have seen a mocking-bird with its chin resting 
 upon its breast run the full compass of its 
 voice ; whilst, on the other hand, it is not un- 
 common for it to ut ter every note it has 
 mastered, with its neck at full stretch. Such 
 feats are possible on account of the exceeding 
 elasticity of the walls of the posterior mouth- 
 cavity and the anterior throat-cavity. The 
 shortening of the trachea really does this : it 
 gives the lungs greater power to act directly 
 upon the glottis, thus adding volume to the 
 notes. For instance, if you watch a quail as 
 it whistles " Bob White," you will note that 
 its head moves up and down with the length- 
 ening And shortening of the trachea necessary 
 to the extremes of power required. The yel- 
 low-billed cuckoo, muttering its well-known 
 croak, slightly elevates its beak, and you can 
 see its upper throat palpitating in accord with 
 the rattling notes. Indeed, it appears to be 
 sucking the sounds back from the glottis into 
 the hollow of the mouth and throat, where 
 they are shaken about like peas in a box ! 
 All the common song-birds have a way of ut- 
 tering falsetto notes occasionally. The most 
 notable example of this is the nocturn of the 
 mocking-bird, in which falsetto phrases are 
 used with singularly plaintive and touching 
 effect. After careful study, I have concluded 
 that the notes above described are produced 
 by a division of the vibrating air-column in the 
 mouth, caused by the bird drawing its tongue 
 back nearly over the glottis, while the man- 
 dibles are kept as nearly closed as possible. 
 The brown thrush is expert in rendering very 
 delicate falsetto sketches, and watching him 
 with a strong field-glass has convinced me 
 that I have correctly described his method. 
 The caged mocking-bird rarely indulges in 
 this delicious music and therefore is iard to 
 
116 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 study, since his falsetto in his wild state is 
 mostly a nocturnal performance. 
 
 The sparrows, the thrushes, the meadow-lark, 
 and some of the warblers elevate their heads 
 (with their beaks at an angle of at least forty- 
 five degrees with the horizon) in singing. It 
 is by this attitude that they can give greatest 
 freedom to their throats. Other songsters, 
 including the orioles, the blue-bird, and most 
 of the smaller fry, utter their notes while in 
 any position, even on the wing. 
 
 I have called attention to these extrinsic 
 features of the song-habit in birds because I 
 deem them of great value in determining the 
 voice functions of the trachea and syrinx of 
 the o seines. 
 
 V. 
 
 The most difficult question in our investiga- 
 tion arises out of the unmusical notes the 
 quacks, croaks, jarring cries, and cackling 
 noises made by the birds when not inclined 
 to whistle. If, on one hand, a pure flute note 
 cannot be made by the vibration of the mi- 
 nute syringeal membranes of a mocking-bird, 
 it would appear, on the other hand, that a 
 hoarse, gutteral, rasping snarl could not bo 
 originated by a whistling orifice, or, in other 
 words, by the glottis of a mocking-bird, a 
 crow, or a meadow-lark ; but a little attention 
 will clear up the trouble. When we are very 
 near the crow, for instance, his voice divides 
 itself into two distinct sounds, one a clear, 
 steady wind-note, the other a jarring noise, 
 harsh and disagreeable. The effect is the 
 well-known caw, sometimes successfully imi- 
 tated by n boy making a nasal sound in his 
 hollowed hands. The jarring or rasping ele- 
 ment of the crow s voice is really caused by 
 the vibration of a membrane, but it is not a 
 syringeal membrane. The note first made by 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 117 
 
 the breath from the glottis is reflected back 
 by the bird's lifted tongue, and the element of 
 harshness is caught from the strained and vi- 
 bratory membranes of the mouth and the 
 nasal and throat cavities. The peculiar part 
 played by the syrinx in this case is that by a 
 rocking, quivering, or gyratory motion it im- 
 parts to the tracheal column of air sent out 
 through the glottis a spiral or palpitant cur- 
 rent. This current would blow a quavering 
 flute-note of some sort were it not interrupted 
 at the glottis by the bird's uplifted tongue, and 
 broken and flung back into the throat and 
 nasal cavities, where it is further disintegrat- 
 ed by the elastic membranes, as already men- 
 tioned. 
 
 The parrot is a strong instance of a bird who 
 has a wonderful voice, but whose syrinx is 
 weak and imperfect, viewed from Prof. Hux- 
 ley's ground. There is no septum or median 
 membrane in the parrot's organ, and there- 
 fore one "vocal cord" is missing, and yet 
 how clear is his whistle, how pure his reed- 
 note calls, how deep and how incomparably 
 rich his throat cries ! Surely all these are not 
 made in that poor little half-equipped syrinx I 
 The thick, heavy, fleshy tongue of the parrot, 
 and the spacious throat-cavity behind it, are 
 the special means by which its voice is con- 
 trolled and enriched. The so-called speaking 
 voice of this and other birds is a lingual and 
 throat modification of the glottis notes. Again, 
 the large, pad-like tongue of the parrot, perfect- 
 ly reflecting the breath from the glottis back 
 into the throat-cavity, gives the best proof of 
 what I have claimed, by producing the 
 closest parody of a genuine voice ever uttered 
 by a bird. Just here is the place to say that 
 all of the flute-voiced birds have very slender 
 and delicate tongues. I have before me as I 
 write the tongue of a mocking-bird and 
 
118 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 of a loggerhead shrike, each attached to the 
 trachea and syrinx of the bird, and upon com- 
 parison the shrike's tongue is found much 
 the thicker and clumsier, though without any 
 tendency to fleshiness. The tongues of the 
 wood-thrush and the mocking-bird are almost 
 exactly alike, whilst those of the orchard-ori- 
 ole and the bluebird are very closely similar. 
 
 The whole arrangement of the lower man- 
 dible (with the tongue and the muscles and 
 membranes clustered about it), in the case of 
 the real songsters, appears to be modified 
 with reference to music-making. In execut- 
 ing a rapid score, the mocking-bird's tongue 
 moves like a vibrating piece of steel, and the 
 same is true of all the twitterers and brilliant 
 voice-shakers. Pure flute- warbling, however, 
 is performed with the syrinx, though not gen- 
 erated in it, the muscular movements at the 
 bottom of the tracheal column letting the air 
 out of the lungs in palpitations (like those 
 from the human mouth in flute or fife play- 
 ing), and imparting to it various degrees of 
 volume and velocity. 
 
 The tongue-notes of most birds are easily dis- 
 tinguishable by the * 4 t" sound with which 
 they begin the syllables "tee" and "tit" 
 often recurring. The meadow-lark utters a 
 cry which sounds like " tith-h-h-t." It is 
 made by breaking a prolonged note up be- 
 tween the tongue and the roof of the mouth. 
 The red-winged blackbird renders a curious 
 phrase composed of a " shake" and a tongue- 
 note combined. A friend of mine character- 
 izes the performance as something ' ' between 
 a snort and a giggle." The belted kingfisher 
 has a way of chattering through a chink be- 
 tween his tongue and the roof of his mouth ; 
 his voice is a very keen and clear one, de- 
 spite the primitive condition of his voice- 
 organs, and to my ear it is not without a cer- 
 
THE ANATOMY OP BlfiD-SONG. 119 
 
 tain touch of picturesque melody. Even the 
 woodpeckers, notably Erythrocephalus and 
 Colaptes, have very pure fife-notes. 
 
 But let us now turn and examine the true 
 mouth of the avian flute. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The upper end of a song-bird's trachea is 
 peculiarly modified, terminating in a chink 
 or slit just at the root of the tongue. This 
 slit, the glottis, is surrounded by a bundle of 
 muscles, and has two heavy lips by which it 
 is closed at the bird's will. The anterior por- 
 tion of the glottis aperture is nearly circular, 
 but it terminates posteriorly in a thin angle, 
 like a keen knife-cut. Out of this little chink 
 has been blown the rapturous sylvan fluting 
 about which the poets have raved since the 
 days of Homer and Sappho. 
 
 Just in front of the glottidian fissure there 
 is a valve-like fold of mucous membrane 
 which, when the tongue is raised, is drawn 
 across the anterior line of the circular part of 
 the opening. This modified upper end of the 
 trachea, the so-called larynx, is connected 
 with the tongue-bone by slender muscles, and 
 the lips of the fissure are moved by nicely 
 adjusted intrinsic muscles, of which the mock- 
 ing-bird has five pairs. The contractor mus- 
 cles of the trachea are connected with the 
 larynx, and when they are drawn taut the 
 glottis is depressed between the horns of the 
 hyoid bone, which helps to form a resonant 
 cavity in the bird's mouth, and at the same 
 time the anterior fold of mucous membrane 
 is erected as a sort of sounding-board in front 
 of the orifice, while the tongue acts as a re- 
 flector or vibrator, as the need may be. In 
 the mocking-bird and, indeed, in nearly all 
 the true song-birds that I have dissected, the 
 air cells, " membranous pneumatic sacs," are 
 
120 THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 
 
 largely and peculiarly developed, and servo 
 a good turn in the matter of song-making, 
 each inflated membrane, especially those of 
 the anterior part of the thorax, acting as a 
 drum-head or sounding-board. In a word, 
 the whole bird is pneumatic, and often in 
 the ecstasy of great song-bursts, it vibrates 
 throughout from tip to tip, as if shaking the 
 sound in a spray of melody from its shining 
 feathers. The peculiar swaying and palpitat- 
 ing motions with which most birds accom- 
 pany their singing are attendant upon the 
 respiratory exertions necessary to keep the 
 pneumatic sacs full of air. Here again that 
 semi-automatic action, peculiar to the avian 
 structure, comes into play, for each one 
 of these respiratory movements affects the 
 trachea, larynx, and glottis by muscular 
 interference, if I may so call it. That 
 is, muscles called into action for one pur- 
 pose affect other muscles, and cause them 
 to contract, thus bringing about an in- 
 voluntary double movement. Thus when 
 the barn-yard cock stretches his neck at full 
 length to crow, the movement depresses the 
 glottis, lifts the tongue, and forms a sound- 
 chamber in the posterior mouth-cavity, all 
 at once. 
 
 The lips of the mocking-bird's glottis are 
 extremely elastic, and may be so drawn as 
 to give any shape to the glottidian fissure that 
 may be desired in forming^ note. So when 
 the tongue is drawn back with the barbs or 
 prongs of its bony tip close above the glottis, 
 and by muscular action is set quivering, the 
 purest flute notes are disintegrated and sent 
 forth in a shower of sounds, pleasing or harsh 
 according to the correlation of the other fac- 
 tors of modification. 
 
 I take the mocking-bird (mimus poly glottis) 
 as the highest example, in my discussion of 
 
THE ANATOMY OF BIRD-SONG. 121 
 
 "song anatomy," and it must be admitted 
 that it is the highest type of song-bird from 
 every point of view, though its syrinx is ab- 
 solutely insignificant. The anatomy of its 
 larynx is, on the other hand, quite wonderful. 
 For several reasons I have chosen to make a 
 comparison between the shrike and the 
 mocking-bird, mainly, however, on account 
 of the general resemblance borne by the log- 
 gerhead and the mocker in size and coloring, 
 and of the great difference in their voice 
 powers. 
 
 The trachea of the shrike tapers very rap- 
 idly from glottis to syrinx, while that of 
 Mimus is nearly uniform from just in front 
 of the syrinx to where it suddenly expands 
 near the glottidean fissure. The shrike has 
 but three pairs of intrinsic laryngeal mus 
 cles, the lips of the glottis are thick and clum- 
 sy, as compared with those of the mocking- 
 bird, and the fissure is larger and more ob- 
 tusely angular, whilst the tongue is broader 
 and far less delicate than the songster's. 
 
 The laryngeal enlargement of the mocking- 
 bird's trachea is slightly egg-shaped, or keg- 
 shaped ; that of the shrike is simply a con- 
 tinuation of the tracheal expansion beginning 
 at the syrinx. The shrike has a well-devel- 
 oped septum ; indeed, in every particular its 
 syrinx is far superior to that of the mocking- 
 bird, and the contractor muscles of its trachea 
 are much more powerful. Its defect, as in 
 the case of the crow, the cuckoo, and many 
 other birds, lies in the formation of the glot- 
 tis, the mouth-cavity, and the larynx, the 
 shape of the tongue, and the lack of a suffi- 
 cient number of intrinsic laryngeal muscles 
 with which to control the shape and action of 
 the glottidean fissure. 
 
 Viewing the larynx and glottis as the 
 mouth-piece of the avian song-organ or flute, 
 
122 THE ANATOMY OF 3IRD-80NQ. 
 
 the difference between this mouth-piece in 
 true singers and in oscines that cannot sing is 
 easy to distinguish. The shrike tries to sing 
 with his throat wide open that is, he tries to 
 whistle without "puckering" his lips! The 
 mocking-bird knows better. 
 
 VII. 
 
 In summing up the facts, or the more im- 
 portant ones, connected with the ' ' anatomy 
 of bird-song," I would emphasize the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 1. The syrinx of the true singing birds is 
 invariably smaller, weaker, arid more ob- 
 scurely developed than that of the songless 
 oscines. 
 
 2. The laryngeal and glottidean membranes 
 and muscles are far more highly developed 
 and specialized in the true singers than they 
 are in the oscines that cannot sing. 
 
 3. The so-called "vocal cords" in the 
 syrinx of the most musical birds are utterly 
 devoid of the structure of true vocal cords, 
 and serve merely as valves or stops at the 
 openings of the bronchial tubes. 
 
 4. The intrinsic muscles of the syrinx in 
 true singers are more delicate, more numer- 
 ous, and more specialized than those of the 
 songless oscines, giving greater control over 
 the management of the breath blown from 
 the lungs into the trachea. 
 
 5. The form of the trachea, just below the 
 glottis, in other words, the form of the larynx, 
 in all the accomplished songsters is very dif- 
 ferent from that in the other oscines, being 
 somewhat like the " egg-choke" in the muz- 
 zle of the shot-gun barrel. 
 
 6. The tongue of the true singer is slenderer 
 and thinner than that of the whistler, or that 
 of any other songless oscine. 
 
 There are many facts, connected with the 
 philosophy of the vibration of air-columns, 
 
THE ANATOM Y OF BIRD-SONG. 123 
 
 which controvert the theory of syringeal 
 song-generation. This theory makes the 
 flute upside down, and gives it a jarring 
 tongue, like that of a jew's-harp. A vibra- 
 tory, sound-producing membrane in the 
 mocking-bird's syrinx would destroy utterly 
 the purity of its rich flute-notes, just as a 
 harp-tongue in a flute would send a harsh jar 
 through every strain blown from it. Above 
 all, a ' ' vocal cord " less than the twentieth of 
 an inch in length, and but little more than 
 half as wide as it is long, is not the origin of the 
 vigorous, far-sent whistling, twittering, and 
 chirruping that we hear in all the leafy groves 
 of spring. Syrinx is a good name, suggestive 
 of the avian pipe, but it should be given to 
 the larynx, of which the glottis is the mouth- 
 piece, not to the obscure little pump- valve 
 box at the hinder end of the trachea. 
 
 If I have succeeded in showing that the 
 mocking-bird is a flute-player, instead of be- 
 ing a French-harp blower, I shall not regret 
 my work. Indeed, I do not regret it in any 
 event, for the scattered spaces of time that I 
 have filled with it are among the charming 
 episodes of a varied out-door experience, 
 brimming now with all manner of melodious 
 memories. 
 
SOME HYOID HINTS. 
 
 ONE of the unaccountable prejudices har- 
 bored for centuries in the human mind is that 
 against certain harmless reptiles, birds, and 
 other animals. It would be easy to fill many 
 pages with a catalogue of the victims suffer- 
 ing from this curious obliquity of judgment 
 on the part of intelligent and even cultured 
 people. The feeling against non-venomous 
 reptiles may be attributed, with some stretch 
 of the truth, to the disgust engendered by 
 ugliness ; but there would appear to be no intel- 
 ligible foundation whatever for the prejudice 
 against certain birds. The cat-bird, for in- 
 stance, a beautiful, useful, and charmingly 
 musical little creature, naturally inclined to 
 love man and to serve him, has been almost 
 universally despised by those who ought 
 to love it and defend it. The yellow-billed 
 cuckoo is another singularly unfortunate bird 
 in this regard. In the Southern States espe- 
 cially it is the subject of great slander. But 
 there is, perhaps, no other family of birds 
 which, in America at least, has been subjected 
 to such unmitigated, baseless persecution as 
 that to which the family of woodpeckers has 
 submitted within the present century, and 
 falling, too, from the hands of the most en- 
 lightened populace on the globe. So deep- 
 rooted is this popular prejudice against the 
 woodpecker that one may be sure of eliciting 
 an expression of surprise, if not of contempt, 
 from almost any audience, by remarking upon 
 the beauty of any species of the bird. Or- 
 nithologists have often noted this, and no 
 part of the prejudice has originated with 
 tl 10 in. Indeed no bird has been studied more 
 
136 SOME EYOID HINTS. 
 
 enthusiastically or praised more cordially by 
 intelligent students of natural history than 
 Picus has been, unless we must except the 
 kingfisher. The American ornithologists, es- 
 pecially, have been generous in the time and 
 labor given to a loving study of the life, 
 habits, and specific traits of our many and 
 beautiful woodpeckers. If Wilson's and Au- 
 dubon's noble works could have gone early 
 into the hands of the people, they would have 
 been of incalculable benefit in uprooting and 
 destroying much of the popular, quasi-legen- 
 dary prejudice of which I have spoken, but 
 those works were necessarily expensive and 
 beyond the reach of all but the rich few. It 
 is only within the last twenty years that pop- 
 ular science has been serving its true purpose 
 by taking the cheapest and farthest-reaching 
 channels of self -distribution, and this great 
 factor in the progress of common intelligence 
 and universal culture has. perhaps, come too 
 late to do its whole work. Still the time has 
 arrived, no doubt, when one may put into 
 popular form even a study of woodpecker 
 life, and be sure of a wide and sympathetic 
 audience. Possibly a mere guarded and tech- 
 nically severe sketch of some anatomical and 
 physiological facts of woodpecker biology 
 would hardly be so secure of popular atten- 
 tion, and yet the number of persons who 
 would greedily go through many pages of the 
 dryest and most abstruse phraseology to get 
 one grain of new knowledge in any field of sci- 
 ence is by no means small. In fact, the strong- 
 est trend of the world's forces to-day is toward 
 the popularization and the simplification of 
 scientific methods of acquiring knowledge in 
 every field of inquiry. It is this trend which 
 is fast bringing us to see that no knowledge (no 
 matter of how apparently trivial facts in na- 
 ture) is unprofitable or without its place in the 
 
SOME HYOID HINTS. 127 
 
 great chain of wisdom. Art is not the whole of 
 life, nor is material progress the only good. 
 The pleasure of knowledge, never embodied 
 in painting, sculpture, or poem, nor applied 
 to any economic purpose, is of itself a mighty 
 factor in the operations of human life. These 
 may be trite sentences, but I fear they yet 
 are not sufficiently axiomatic to shield me 
 wholly when I come to disclose the subject of 
 this paper, to wit: The Tongue of a Wood- 
 pecker. If I should say, the tongue of a night- 
 ingale, instead, or the tongue of a mocking- 
 bird, or even the tongue of a blue-bird, I 
 might hope for a gracious audience, but ths 
 tongue of a woodpecker has not been em- 
 balmed in melody by a Shelley, a Keats, a 
 Tennyson, or a Sappho, nor has it been set in 
 romance by the genius of all ages, nor ever 
 has it endeared itself to the popular heart by 
 amorous carols in all the orchards and groves 
 of the land. Still I might make bold to claim 
 for my woodpecker's tongue some pleasing 
 notes heard in the wild woods when the 
 mornings are sweet and still. 
 
 Buffon, giving rein to the Latin hobby of 
 romance, described the woodpecker's life as 
 one of singular and terrible barrenness and 
 misery. Indeed if Buffon, viewed in the 
 light of to-day, may be called an ornitholo- 
 gist, I may as well modify what I said a while 
 ago, and admit that one great bird-student has 
 slandered my subject in a mild way. "Its 
 movements are brusk," says he, "it has a 
 restless air, harsh traits and features, a sav- 
 age and wild disposition, fleeing all society, 
 even of its own kind, and when the stress of 
 passion forces it to seek a mate, it is without 
 any of those graces with which the feeling 
 charges the movements of other beings who 
 experience it with a tender heart." But my 
 observations, extending throughout some 
 
128 SOME HYOID HINTS. 
 
 years and over a wide scope of country, go 
 directly to the contrary. There are no hap- 
 pier, brighter, or more loving birds than our 
 woodpeckers. True they are noisy, restless, 
 bellicose, and self-assertive to a degree, but 
 what strong, healthy, wide-awake bird is not ? 
 Even Buffon, in giving the French phonetic 
 rendering of the green woodpecker's voice, 
 tio, tio, tio, contradicts himself, for that note 
 is by no means disagreeable to the ear, being 
 very like the quee-o, quee-o, quee-o of our 
 golden- wing and our red-head (Melanerpes) . 
 There is a martial fire and force in the vigor- 
 ous call of the ivory-billed woodpecker, and a 
 rather savage strain in the voice of the log- 
 cock, but both these great birds are bright, 
 happy, companion-loving, and far from evil- 
 disposed in any way. 
 
 All the smaller woodpeckers have a rather 
 pleasing cackle, heard mostly in the spring, 
 varying from gip, gip, gip, through several 
 shades, to pip, pip, pip, uttered often with 
 ecstatic rapidity. Two or three species, nota- 
 bly the golden-wing and the red-head, repeat 
 the phrase, pee-to, pee-to, as they climb a tree 
 bole, or gallop through the air. Indeed in the 
 West and South a* large part of the life and 
 cheer of the woods, fields, and orchards is due 
 to the activity and loquacity of the wood- 
 peckers, whose whisking wings and gay colors 
 constantly attract attention. 
 
 But it was not of the vocal habit of the 
 woodpecker's tongue that I set myself to 
 write, pleasing as the task might be. 
 
 If you will cast aside all prejudice, and 
 agree to forego the pleasure of putting your 
 tongue in your cheek and twirling your 
 thumbs in derision .of my subject, I will pro- 
 
SOME HTOID HINTS. 129 
 
 II. 
 
 Any ornithologist will tell you that a wood- 
 pecker's tongue is the most peculiar organ he 
 ever examined, strangely complicated in its 
 mechanism and singularly striking in the 
 variations of its special development in dif- 
 ferent species, and that no organic feature of 
 any bird has been more minutely studied by 
 comparative anatomists. From Borelli and 
 Aldrovande and Mery and Olaiis Jacobeus on 
 down to Owen, Macgillivray and Parker, there 
 has been no end to the study and literature of 
 the peculiarities observable in the hyoid bone 
 of the Picidee. By all these writers the 
 European green woodpecker has been taken 
 as the type, unless Parker's use of Picus 
 minor in his general anatomical studies may 
 be called an exception. 
 
 The anatomy of the green woodpecker, so 
 far as the tongue is concerned, is almost iden- 
 tical with that of our American red-head- 
 ed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), 
 saving that our bird's skull has no decided 
 groove in its crown. We have two extremely 
 specialized genera, Picus and Colaptes, whose 
 tongue peculiarities are extreme. These may 
 be taken as types for the purposes of this 
 paper. Those who are not ornithologists, 
 however, cannot be supposed to know any- 
 thing about bird-anatomy, therefore it will be 
 necessary to sketch here an outline of the 
 woodpecker's lingual peculiarities. 
 
 The tongue proper is a slender flattish shaft 
 lying between the mandibles, and flat upon 
 the lower one when not in use. Thus disposed, 
 it lacks somewhat of reaching to the end of 
 the bill. Its fore-end is of a hard horny sub- 
 stance, and is armed with barbs not unlike 
 those of a fish-hook. Back of this the tongue- 
 bone (hyoid) is encased in a sheath of muscu- 
 
130 SOME HYOID HINTS. 
 
 lar, membranous, and nervous tissues, and it 
 divides into two horns, which passing back- 
 ward and upward, reach forward over the top 
 of the skull, and down to the base of the 
 upper mandible, or into the nostril, or curl 
 under the right eye and rest almost, or quite, 
 against the front of the quadrate bone. In 
 making this circuitous passage the forks of 
 the tongue-bone go on either side of the neck 
 and come together, without coalescing, on the 
 back of the skull, whence they remain touch- 
 ing each other and parallel, to the end of their 
 course. 
 
 In the genus Picus, of which I take the 
 hairy woodpecker as the typical species, the 
 hyoid cornua (forks of the tongue-bom end 
 their peculiar journey below and rather pos- 
 terior to the bird's right eye. 
 
 In the genus Melanerpes, of which our 
 white-and-black red-head is typical, the ter- 
 minus is on the central front of the skull, just 
 above the base of the upper mandible, whilst 
 the genus Colaptes, to which our flicker be- 
 longs, has its hyoid cornua prolonged into 
 its nasal cavity by way of a nostril. 
 
 In each case, throughout its entire course, 
 this peculiar hyoidean process is sheathed in 
 a curiously-woven wisp of muscles and 
 nerves, which is modified and prolonged be- 
 yond the bony parts, most peculiarly in the 
 instances of Picus and Colaptes. 
 
 The most obvious function of this strangely 
 specialized hyoid process is to give a great 
 thrust to the tongue, so that it may be pro- 
 jected far beyond the end of the bill. The. 
 longer the hyoid cornua the farther the tongue 
 can be thrust out of the mouth. So that it 
 has been taken for granted, so far as I know, 
 that the curling of the cornua over the skull 
 between the skin and the bone, was merely 
 the most handy and economical way of difr. 
 
SO ME HYOID HINTS. 131 
 
 posing of them, in order to get the best re- 
 sults from them in controlling the tongue 
 movements. Does it not appear curious, how- 
 ever, when one comes to note that Colaptes 
 has its tongue-bones thrust into its nostril, 
 while those of Picus are curled around under 
 the eye to near the ear ? 
 
 Although I had previously dissected many 
 woodpeckers, and had studied for years with 
 care their tongue-anatomy, it was not until 
 quite recently that I began to suspect that 
 another function than that of projecting the 
 tongue belonged to this peculiar specialization 
 of the hyoidean apparatus. 
 
 During an out-door meeting of the Indiana 
 Academy of Science, I went into a dense wood 
 to kill a wood-thrush for dissection. While I 
 was watching for my bird a hairy woodpecker 
 came and lit near me on a small dead branch 
 of a beech tree, where it began to tap the 
 wood with its bill, meantime slowly hopping 
 backwards down the stem. It was not more 
 than eight feet from me, and while watching 
 it I saw that it would strike two or three 
 smart blows, and then appear to be listening, 
 with the tip of its bill resting against the 
 wood. This hearkening attitude was never 
 preserved for longer than the merest instant 
 of time, but its purpose could not be misun- 
 derstood. The bird was listening to hear any 
 movements made by worm or larvae within 
 the branch. The bill-taps were meant to 
 startle the victims and to make them move, 
 so that they could be heard. I became inter- 
 ested and watched closely until the bird suc- 
 cessfully located its prey, and by a few deft 
 chisel-strokes cut in and took it. When I re- 
 turned to where the Academy had assembled, 
 I told President David S. Jordan, the well- 
 known ichthyologist, that I believed I had 
 ;just made an interesting discovery, and sug- 
 
132 SOME HYOID HINT is. 
 
 gested to him that the hyoid cornua might 
 aid Picus in hearing. We discussed the mat- 
 ter for a moment, and the subject passed, but 
 it came again and again to my mind, till at 
 length I set about making a systematic study 
 of it. 
 
 In the case of the hairy woodpecker the 
 tongue muscles are so arranged that by a very 
 simple action the tongue may be drawn far 
 back into the mouth-cavity, near the throat. 
 This is true in a greater or less degree of all 
 the woodpeckers having the specialized hyoid- 
 ean process, but in the hairy species it is ex- 
 tremely marked. 
 
 The true woodpeckers, from the great ivory- 
 bill down to the little downy species (Pubes- 
 cens), have poor ears, and are forced to de- 
 pend upon their excellent eyes for detecting 
 the approach of an enemy, hence the contin- 
 ual motion of the head, which has given color 
 to the statements of Buffon. The log-cock, 
 which a few years ago was one of the com- 
 monest birds of the Western "deadenings," 
 makes its great scarlet head-tuft fantastically 
 conspicuous by tossing it this way and that 
 in its vigilant watchfulness. 
 
 Nearly all the species have the habit of 
 making a vibrating noise by striking an elas- 
 tic piece of wood with the bill. This singular 
 call serves the woodpecker in the place of a 
 song. To his heavy, dull ears the sound 
 doubtless is very pleasing. To understand 
 this, take a string of the size of a guitar 
 string, and a foot long, place one end between 
 your teeth and the other between the thumb 
 and index finger of the left hand, draw it taut, 
 and strike it lightly with the right thumb. 
 You will hear a sound quite inaudible to an- 
 other person, though close to you. This aud- 
 itory phenomenon is caused by the vibrations 
 of the string being imparted to the lower jaw- 
 
SOME H70ID HINTS. 133 
 
 bone, whose articulations are close to the ears, 
 and whose muscular, ligamentous, and ner- 
 vous connections with the ear-bones are very 
 intimate. 
 
 A moment's reflection will convince anyone 
 that the woodpecker's brain must be fortified 
 against the effect of concussion, for if any 
 other bird's head were dashed with such vio- 
 lence against hard wood, as the woodpecker's 
 head habitually is, death would quickly re- 
 sult. Indeed no person, after examination of 
 the picidaean habits, can doubt that the wood- 
 pecker is hard of hearing. Connect with this 
 the singular fact that those species which are 
 forced to depend upon hearing to locate their 
 prey, have the hy oid cornua reaching to the ' 
 immediate vicinity of the ear, whilst the spe- 
 cies not so necessitated show a modification 
 of those bones, and we have a curious sugges- 
 tion at the least. 
 
 Upon dissecting a hairy woodpecker we dis- 
 cover that the central shaft of the tongue-bone 
 is simpler than that of most birds, and that it 
 forks directly, without definite articulations, 
 thus making the entire hyoidean apparatus a 
 continuous and singularly elastic bone, pecul- 
 iarly suited to conducting vibrations through- 
 out its length. 
 
 Now when the bird's tongue is drawn far 
 back in the mouth, the posterior end of the 
 hyoid bones is thrust against a cushion of 
 membrane, muscle, and ligament lying imme- 
 diately in front of the quadrate bone, which 
 is the anterior ear-wall, and if at the same 
 time the lower mandible is let fall a little, so 
 that the mouth is slightly open, the posterior 
 process of thejugal bone, called the quadrate 
 jugal, is made to press upon the lower part 
 of the quadrate bone, which, being slight and 
 having air-chambers around it, becomes a sort 
 
134 SOME 11YOID HINTS. 
 
 of tympanum for conducting vibrations to the 
 auditory nerves. 
 
 The upper mandible of the woodpecker is 
 longer than the lower, and so it receives the 
 force of every blow made in pecking hard 
 wood. But this mandible is not movable. 
 
 Now, if with a good opera-glass you will 
 carefully watch a hairy woodpecker when it 
 is trying to locate a wood-worm in a dead 
 limb, you will soon note that by marvelous 
 slight he first strikes the hard outer crust of 
 the wood a smart blow or two, making a dent 
 therein. Then into this dent he thrusts his 
 upper mandible, and allows his lower one's 
 point to rest against the wood ; at the same 
 time his tongue is drawn in to the utmost, and 
 the whole attitude of the bird is a listening 
 one. It is a swift movement, and will not be 
 noticed except by the most careful observer.. 
 Now when the bird's tongue is drawn far in, 
 it rests between the prongs of the lower mnp- 
 dible, and, pressing upon them, forms a per- 
 fect connection for receiving the vibrations 
 imparted thereto. 
 
 I was at first of the opinion that in the 
 listening attitude Picus thrust his tongue 
 against the wood, but this was error, as I soon 
 discovered. 
 
 III. 
 
 Turning from the true woodpecker to the 
 modified species Melanerpes erythrocepJialus, 
 we find some curious facts. 
 
 The hairy woodpecker (Picus villosns) is a 
 much smaller bird than the red-headed spe- 
 cies (Melanerpes erythrocephulus), yet the 
 former has the more powerfully fluted bill 
 and a brain thrown much farther back in its 
 skull, which is the heavier. The upper man- 
 dible of the red-head is less pronounced in its 
 superiority over the lower, than in the case 
 
SOME 1IYOID HINTS. 135 
 
 of Pieus, and it is not so sharply triangular 
 as that of the genuine woodpecker. 
 
 In all of its habits the red-head is interme- 
 diate between Pic us and Colaptes that is, be- 
 tween the genuine woodpecker and the 
 flicker, but, curiously enough, Colaptes has the 
 hyoid cornua produced till they enter the nos- 
 tril ! Why is this ? 
 
 The red-head is an expert fly-catcher, a 
 great fruit-eater, and much given to picking 
 insects up from the surface of the ground, 
 but he does not take his food, as a rule, by 
 pecking into wood. 
 
 Colaptes, however, although he does not 
 peck much in wood, pecks holes in the ground, 
 and takes therefrom, in the form of grubs, 
 worms and larvae, the greater part of his food. 
 In this his habit is much like that of the 
 woodcock or the snipe. His bill, however, is 
 not soft, flexible, and sensitive, like the 
 snipe's, though it is decurved and very little 
 like that of Picus. 
 
 Now it is well known that the olfactory 
 powers are weak in most birds, and they are 
 perhaps weakest in the woodpeckers. It is 
 also known that the gustatory powers of birds 
 are dull and weak. Add to these facts that 
 the sense of smell assists that of taste, and 
 another suggestion arises. Colaptes may have 
 his hyoid cornua and their attendant wisp of 
 muscles and nerves thrust into his nostril to 
 aid him in determining Jby taste and smell, or 
 by a modified and specialized sense of touch, 
 the quality of the food found in the ground ! 
 
 The dissections required to settle such a 
 question are of a very minute and difficult 
 sort, and need not be described. 
 
 The sap-sucker (Sphyropicus) is not by habit 
 an insectivorous bird ; his chief food is the sap 
 and viscous matter lying between the bark 
 and the wood of living 1 roes, and so his hyoid 
 
136 SOME HYOID HINTS. 
 
 cornua are elongated very little, if any, be- 
 yond the base of the skull. His food is 
 selected by sight, and he has no need for a 
 specialized hyoidean apparatus. Indeed all 
 of the species of woodpeckers that are not de- 
 pendent upon boring into wood or into the 
 ground, and that therefore do not have to 
 locate their food or test its quality without 
 seeing it, have the hyoid bones less developed 
 than in Picus. 
 
 The protrusion of the tongue is the more 
 obvious function of this hyoidean peculiarity, 
 but the more obscure function of aid to the 
 dull senses of taste and hearing is not there- 
 fore less important. 
 
 It would not be of particular interest in this 
 connection to go into the minutiae of the many 
 slight variations of the tongue-peculiarity ob- 
 servable in different species. I have given 
 the extremes, the mean and, in the instance 
 of Colaptes, a case of curious intermedia to 
 specialization (where an extreme might Lave 
 been expected like that of Spheropicus) for 
 meeting the exigency of a singular habit. 
 
 It is impossible, in a paper addressed to the 
 popular understanding, to make minute com- 
 parisons in anatomy, but the facts upon which 
 I insist may be formulated as follows : 
 
 1st. The picidaean development of the hyoid 
 cornua in the genus Picus has for its second- 
 ary function a mechanical and perhaps sen- 
 sory aid to hearing. 
 
 2d. Such development in the genus Colaptes 
 is in aid of the sense of taste. 
 
 So minute and obscure are the nerve lines 
 of the hyoid sheath, and so complicated are 
 the wisps of motor nerves controlling the 
 tongue of the woodpecker, that one may not 
 speak with perfect knowledge as to where mere 
 motor action leaves off, and the telegraphy 
 of sense begins, but it appears to me that to 
 
SOME HYOID HINTS. 137 
 
 the ear of Picus the tongue conveys aid, and 
 from the olfactory organ of Colaptes the 
 tongue receives aid that in each case the 
 hyoid cornua are auxiliary to an organ other- 
 wise powerless to perform the task required 
 of it by a narrow and exacting habit of life. 
 In other words, if Picus could have heard the 
 worm stir in the wood, we should not have 
 found his tongue-bones seeking his ear, and 
 if Colaptes had been blessed with a fine sense 
 of taste, his nostrils would not have been in- 
 vaded by his hyoid cornua in quest of aid. 
 
 The sheath or nerve-wisp in which the 
 tongue-bones (hyoid cornua) of Colaptes are 
 inclosed, runs to near the anterior extremity 
 of the upper mandible, after passing into the 
 right nostril. Each movement of the bird's 
 tongue must be felt in its nasal cavity, there- 
 fore, and to what extent the gustatory sense 
 may thereby be aided is not altogether infer- 
 ence. The extremity of the sheath is nerve- 
 tissue and muscular fiber, and is obscurely 
 connected with the tissue lining the nasal 
 cavity, and this, taken along with the facts 
 already given, makes it clear to my mind that 
 the intrusion of the tongue-bones and tongue- 
 nerves into the olfactory space is not acci- 
 dental any more than their projection around 
 the right eye to the ear of Picus is accidental. 
 
 To a degree, atrophy and hypertrophy of 
 the limbs and organs of animals are the out- 
 come of what may be called hereditary desire 
 arising out of a need, negative or positive. 
 A negative need induces atrophy, as where 
 the need of losing a useless limb slowly with- 
 ers it by non-use. A positive need induces 
 hypertrophy, as where the over-development 
 of a limb is caused by a continuing demand 
 upon its strength and action. 
 
 In all birds the motor nerves of the tongue 
 pass directly to the brain, and in the wood- 
 
138 SOME 11YOID HINTS. 
 
 peckers there is a spray of fine nerves passing 
 from the hyoid sheath all along its course, 
 and disappearing in the adjoining tissues. 
 
 A minute dissection of the head of Pious 
 villosus shows that an obscure flat band of 
 fibrous tissue passes over the quad rate bone, 
 from the end of the hyoid sheath, but not 
 from the ends of the cornua. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that Nature has not 
 stultified herself in the discrimination between 
 Picus and Colaptes, in the matter of giving 
 direction to the posterior wanderings of the 
 tongue-attachments, but has answered, in the 
 only safe way, the insistent demand of a 
 great need in each case. Picus must be able 
 to hear his prey, and yet if his ears were 
 sufficiently sensitive, of themselves, for this 
 purpose, the wood-pounding the bird has to 
 do would kill him. So Colaptes must take 
 his food from the ground ; but his bill is not 
 soft and filled with nerves, like the snipe's, 
 therefore he must depend upon his tongue, 
 which in turn is, alas ! a woodpecker's tongue, 
 and cannot be trusted until it has formed a 
 connection with the olfactory cavity ! 
 
 The woodpecker's eyes are immense, in com- 
 parison with the size of the skull, and have a 
 power of vision not surpassed by that of the 
 hawk's or the kingfisher's. Whenever his 
 chosen food can be selected by his eyes, he has 
 no need for any extraordinary disposition of 
 the tongue-bones. 
 
 In treating the case of Colaptes, I have used 
 the idea of gustatory aid derived from the nos- 
 tril, but I doubt if the actual sense of taste 
 is really aided directly, though this is far from 
 impossible. The chief effect of the nostril and 
 tongue connection may be the registration (by 
 vibration) of the movements of prey when 
 caught. Thus when the bird, with its beak 
 deep in the ground, draws a worm up into its 
 
SOME HYOID HINTS. IW 
 
 mouth with its tongue, the worm's slightest 
 movement is telegraphed through the tongue 
 to the sensitive membrane of the nasal cavity, 
 and so to the brain. 
 
 In this connection it may be interesting to 
 note that Colaptes, in taking food by pecking 
 in the ground, rarely needs to thrust its 
 tongue out very far, as from the nature of the 
 case the prey must be reached by the bill be- 
 fore it is captured. Indeed careful observa- 
 tion has led me to feel quite sure that it is 
 by the touch of the tongue, and the conse- 
 quent impression conveyed to the brain 
 through the hyoid apparatus, that Colaptes 
 distinguishes a grub from a plant-bulb, or a 
 worm from a soft root, as he delves in the soil 
 for his daily food. By an almost precisely 
 similar, though less roundabout way, the 
 woodcock and the snipe, the duck and the 
 goose, distinguish edible from inedible sub- 
 stances buried under mud and water, where 
 neither sight nor the sense of smell, as com- 
 monly defined, can be trusted. 
 
 The hyoid cornua of the humming-bird curls 
 up over the back of the skull, but the tongue 
 is hollow and sensitive, so that the gustatory 
 power is probably fairly well developed, and 
 there is no need of any secondary connection 
 of the organ with the brain ; besides, the hum- 
 ming-bird doubtless uses its eyes in selecting 
 its food. 
 
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