ods and
goddesses, they are so wicked! I wish I was Perseus, and had his
shield, I would fly up to heaven and turn Jupiter, and Apollo, and
Venus into stone; then they would be too heavy to stay in heaven, and
they would tumble down to earth; and then they would be stone statues,
and we should have much finer statues of Apollo and Venus than any
they have now at Rome."

(September 10th, 1796.) S---- (within a month of ten years old) read
to his sister M---- part of Dr. Darwin's chapter upon instinct; that
part in which there is an account of young birds who learn to sing
from the birds who take care of them, not from their parents. S----
immediately recollected a story which he had read last winter in the
Annual Register. Extract from Barrington's Remarks upon singing
Birds. "There was a silly boy once (you know, sister, boys are silly
sometimes) who used to play in a room where his mother had a
nightingale in a cage, and the boy took out of the cage the
nightingale's eggs, and put in some other bird's eggs (a swallow's, I
think) and the nightingale hatched them, and when the swallows grew up
they sang like nightingales." When S---- had done reading, he looked
at the title of the book. He had often heard his father speak of
Zoonomia, and he knew that Dr. Darwin was the author of it.

_S----._ "Oh, ho! Zoonomia! Dr. Darwin wrote it; it is very
entertaining: my father told me that when I read Zoonomia, I should
know the reason why I stretch myself when I am tired. But, sister,
there is one thing I read about the cuckoo that I did not quite
understand. May I look at it again?" He read the following passage.

"For a hen teaches this language with ease to the ducklings she has
hatched from supposititious eggs, and educates as her own offspring;
and the wag-tails or hedge-sparrows learn it from the young cuckoo,
their foster nursling, and supply him with food long after he can fly
about, whenever they hear his cuckooing, which Linnaeus tells us is his
call of hunger."

_S----_ asked what Dr. Darwin meant by "learns _it_."

_M----._ "Learns a language."

_S----._ "What does foster nursling mean?"

_M----._ "It here means a bird that is nursed along with another, but
that has not the same parents."

_S----._ "Then, does it not mean that the sparrows learn from their
foster sister, the cuckoo, to say Cuckoo!"

_M----._ "No; the sparrow don't learn to say cuckoo, but they learn to
understand what he means by that cry;