Songs of the Birds. By Walter Garstang. (Lane. 6s.)— When
we listen to a bird's song, what do we hear ? Can we say that in the sounds he utters we can recognize either music approximating in its intervals to our own scale, or consonants Adentical with those of our speech ? Professor Garstang in ills little book has attempted to set down in our scales of notation, and in syllables which we can pronounce, what he hears in the song of a number of birds, and he has added verse to amplify or explain. We will admit that we find his intro- ductory essay more stimulating than the actual reduction of careless raptures into crotchets and spelling. He suggests a fruitful theme for discussion when he maintains that birds are to-day on an aesthetic level with primitive man, and that from bird song we may learn some of the steps by which emotional cries were first transferred into the beginnings of music. Of his translations into language the most successful is the song of the tree pipit ; but how could he have rested with the incom- pleteness of his collection ? He has no record of the blackcap or of the nightingale. And yet the best feature of the book is the evident pleasure with which it was written.
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