THE SONGS OF BIRDS AND THE PHONOGRAPH.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I was standing for some time a few evenings ago listening to the song of a thrush, which I have listened to a hundred times before with the same feeling with which r wrote in my " History of British Birds :"—" As for the note, that man can have no music in his soul who does not love the song of the throstle." But I noticed at the time, what, indeed,. I had often noticed in former years, that while the likeness is general in the song of each and every bird at all times, yet that it varies in this or that one, as in the variations of this or that tune—a general resemblance, a specific difference —no two perhaps ever exactly the same in every note and quaver and trill. It is just the same with the attitudes of birds. Often I have had to say to myself as I looked at a bird in one or other position as it stood perched on a. branch or on the ground, that if its likeness had been taken there and then by some exact limner, every one who saw it would have said at once that he knew nothing of birds. or of drawing, for that no bird ever naturally stood in any such posture.
But, a capo, to the note. No one who in reading for honours at Oxford has taken up Aristophanes for one of his books, will ever be able to forget that most entertaining writer in the accounts of his " Birds." Every one who has read the play will remember what the various birds have said, and bow they said it. But neither Aristophanes himself, nor any other writer of verse or prose, could ever reproduce their notes,. whether in writing or description, with any exactitude. You listen, and try to keep them in your mind, but it is a vain attempt. You endeavour to imprint each change on your memory, but as vainly : abiit, evasit, erupit. There have been numberless attempts to write down in words the notes of the songs of birds, but no one can say that they have been very successful.
But the reason why I have written at such length, is as a prelude to a thought that occurred to me as I stood listening to the bird I have spoken of. At the moment it occurred to- me that it might be quite possible to take down every note of its song by means of the phonograph, and then, by repro- ducing them more at leisure, they could be written down " in score" by any musician; Art and Nature thus going hand-in- hand. I may be wrong, but that is what occurred to me as a " happy thought" while I listened to those liquid notes of the song-thrush on the bough overhead.
And, further, I thought what a solace it might be to some sufferer in a sick-room, to be able to enjoy the pleasure without the sad drawback of its being at the cost of some
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