Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/178

164 a pailful of cold water. The specific answered its purpose, and one rainy day the parrot was sitting in the open kitchen-window, watching the events of the back yard, where he espied a number of drenched chickens, picking their way across the slippery pavement, "Poor things! "said Polly, and then in an undertone, as the chickens approached the house—"Look here, you've been swearing, haven't you? "This probable story made the rounds of the American press, and is a fair sample of hundreds of similar myths. The truth is, that the wisest parrot ever shipped from Pará to New York does not connect the slightest meaning with the best-remembered word of his vocabulary. Properly speaking, elocutionary birds do not talkat all. They only repeat. They rehearse phrases as they would rehearse a tune, and one might as well credit a telephone with the ability of originating a logical combination of words. If profanity is a sin, swearing parrots will be forgiven, because they know not what they do; but their jokes are equally unintended. A phrase, repeated a thousand times a day, can not, of course, be used always malapropos, but the rarity of the exceptions confirms the rule as decidedly as the lucid interval of a Salvation Army dragoon. In one of Anderson's fairy-tales, the night wind tries to reveal a secret to a man who happens to understand only the dialect of his native village, and thus hears nothing but the whistling of the reeds and the rustling of the leaves; and in the wisest human speech poor Poll hears only the hooting of vowels and the clacking of consonants.

The serpent-charm superstition, too, still holds its own, though a recent communication to the "Scientific American" seems to imply that at least one common-sense explanation of the phenomenon begins to elucidate the fog of mysticism. The writer, evidently a practical naturalist, suggests that the apparent infatuation of "charmed" birds may be nothing but the heroism of maternal affection, overcoming the instinct of self-preservation. That inference may not rarely hold good in the spring-time of our northern woodlands, but squirrels and lizards, as well as birds, are charmed, and in October as often as in May; and the champions of the wizard-theory might at any time test the matter by a simple experiment. "Venomous serpents are the most sluggish of all reptiles (compare "Popular Science Monthly," September, 1879), and, with a bag-net fastened to a ring and tied to the end of a long stick, a rattlesnake can be captured more easily than a butterfly. Quarter your captive in a convenient out-house and let him starve for a couple of days. Then procure a lot of rats, or good-sized mice, such as every mill-boy is ready to deliver for a dime a dozen. Do not introduce them all at once, but successively, and fastened to a string at the end of a stick. The apathy of the snake can be broken by making the mouse scamper in tempting proximity to his fangs. Give the poison time to operate, and watch the conduct of the victims; but observe the precaution of removing them just as the serpent approaches