The last number of the Medical Press contains a curious
account of what it calls a " phenomenal canary,"—a curious vulgarism of our medical contemporary, who surely never sup- posed that any one could describe a canary that was not phe- nomenal, that is, the noumenal canary,—by which he evidently means an extraordinary canary. This extraordinary canary, " at present in the possession of Dr. J. MacGrigor Croft," can talk. The editor says that he visited the canary, and found that it could pronounce a good number of sentences," clearly imitative of the voice of the lady who has had care of it since its early youth." " The effect," adds our contemporary, " produced by the clear, sweetly-uttered sentences pronounced by the bird is almost weird at first ; but the feeling of wonder thus created quickly gives rise to a sensation of exquisite pleasure, which is deepened as the little creature suddenly, at the end of a sentence, rushes off into an ecstasy of song." We do not know why more birds should not have the same power. Indeed, we suspect that it is the want of imitative impulse, rather than the want of mechani- cal apparatus, which now limits to parrots and paroquets, ravens, jackdaws, and a few other birds, the power of human speech. We suspect that if all birds were imitative, we should find all birds able to talk. In the meantime, we have reason to be thankful that more birds are not imitative, since if they were, we should lose a great many of the songs we love, and have a great deal of empty chatter which we do not love at all.
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