Let us also here note, as of possible significance, the fact that the only other utterances possessed by the Brown Towhee besides his "bouncing" song are:
(1) A succession'of'eight or nine rather distressed-sounding squeaking sounds, somewhat as one might squeak with one's lips, and (2) a faint high attenuation of what we may call the family "tseep" of the Fringillidae, some version of which is found in most of the sparrows. Neither of these two "other utterances" are in the least musical. Is it, then, endowing our bird with too much "aesthetic" sense to presume that through the ages he has been listening with something akin to admiration to sounds that were more musical than his own? Some people may object that sounds which are considered "more musical" by the cultivated human sense would not necessarily be so to the senses of lower animals. I do not agree with this objection. I believe in the absolute superiority of certain sounds over others. Sounds that we call musical are not so because we consider them such, but we, being the most cultivated hearers are the best judges of the fact. The same fact is in the course of evolution bound to be realized by other animals. In the Santa Lucia Brown Towhee's choice of what is obviously the most musical sound of the thirteen sounds available for imitative use I believe we see something not unrelated to aesthetic taste.
Let me state my concluding remarks in the form of three points, as follows:
(2)The method is of necessity mimicry, which in itself makes for song-elaboration.
(3)The result therefore, is:(a)an improved song;
(b)the bird's pleasurable awareness of this fact;
(c)the self-stimulation to still further improvement, resulting in a more conscious or deliberate employment of the mimicry method through the exercise of musical taste.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Craig, Wallace. The Voices of Pigeons Regarded as a Means of Social Control. Reprinted at Univ. of Chic. Press, from American Journal of Sociology, xiv, 1, July, 1908.
Hawkins, Chauncey J. Sexual Selection and Bird Song. The Auk, xxxix, January, 1922, pp. ?9-57.
James, William. Psychology (Am. Sci. Series, Briefer Course). New York, 1900.
Morgan, C. Lloyd. Animal Behaviour. London, 1908.
Rhoads, S. N. The Mimetic Origin and Development of Bird Language. American Naturalist, xxiii, March, 1889, pp. 91-102.
Whitman, Charles Otis. Inheritance, Fertility, and the Dominance of Sex and Color in Hybrids of Wild Species of Pigeons. Publ. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919; edited by Oscar Riddle.
Witchell, Charles A. The Evolution of Bird-Song. London, 1896.Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, August 4, 1922.
