Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/631

Rh which give it, when fresh, a very pretty appearance. Besides these, there were several newly-picked leaves and young shoots of a pinkish color, the whole showing a decided taste for the beautiful.' Well may Mr. Gould say,' These highly-decorated halls of assembly must be regarded as the most wonderful instances of bird-architecture yet discovered;' and the taste, we see, of the several species certainly differs." You could not have distincter evidence in a lady's salon carefully decorated with flowers, either of her taste for the beautiful, or of the deliberate subordination of that taste to social purposes, than we have here of the same qualities in birds. Mr. Leith Adams in his paper hardly refers, as we have already observed, to this remarkable class of facts at all, only pointing out that the obvious preference for gayly-colored plumage on the part of the females clearly implies a genuine taste for the beautiful in birds, which is, of course, true, but is not nearly as good evidence of a distinct intellectual development on this point as the elaborate decoration of their bowers by birds for festive purposes. The mere preference of gay colors may be unconscious and purely instinctive, but when a bird looks out for bleached land-shells and tall grasses to ornament its reception-room, and fetches round stones to "fix" the grasses in their proper place, and then uses the hall thus provided only for festive social purposes, you can hardly deny such birds either the powers or the tastes of landscape-gardeners and ball-givers. And we fancy this kind of deliberate taste for the beautiful, and the beautiful in subordination to social purposes, is confined among the lower animals to birds; and, as regards the social purposes, to a very few orders of birds. A great many birds seem to have more appreciation of beauty of color than almost any other class of animals, but only in a few species has it risen to the point of a really decorative social art. We may gather from this that in the bird the perception of harmony is of a very high kind, and this evidently applies to sound as well as color. No creatures utter sounds so full of beauty, or display such wonderful qualifications for imitating the beautiful sounds they hear. Must we not say, then, that the bird has, in more force than any other species of the lower animals, the perception of harmony in forms, colors, and sounds, and the further consciousness of the fascination such harmony has for its own species, and the enhancement it lends to social enjoyments?

Another great mental quality which birds seem to have in excess of other animals is a very fine calculation of distance, and this, too, in direct subordination to their own well-being. It has been shown again and again—and Mr. Leith Adams refers to some facts in support of it in this essay—that, as new weapons of offence are invented, many species of birds narrowly observe the range of the new bows or guns, and keep out of range, not even troubling themselves to go at all farther than is necessary to be out of range. Quite recently we have read, though we cannot verify the reference at present, of some birds