ch of food, and
towards sunset return homeward in noisy flocks, or in constant pairs.
Their forms and motions are often beautiful and attractive. The
immensely long tails of the macaws and the more slender tails of the
Indian parroquets, the fine crest of the cockatoos, the swift flight of
many of the smaller species, and the graceful motions of the little
love-birds and allied forms, together with their affectionate natures,
aptitude for domestication, and power of mimicry, combine to render
them at once the most conspicuous and the most attractive of all the
specially tropical forms of bird life.'

I have purposely left to the last the one point about parrots which
most often attracts the attention of the young, the gay, the giddy, and
the thoughtless: I mean their power of mimicry in human language. And I
believe I am justified in passing it over lightly. For in fact this
power is but a very incidental result of the general intelligence of
parrots, combined with the other peculiarities of their social life and
forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys,
parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in their
habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and
imitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusual
intelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself--at
least, in all save its very highest phases--but the faculty of
accurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate action
only, because they haven't very varied or flexible voices. Parrots and
many other birds, on the contrary--like the starling and still more
markedly the American mocking-bird--being endowed with considerable
flexibility of voice, imitate either songs or spoken words with great
distinctness. In the parrot the power of attention is also very
considerable, for the bird will often try over with itself repeatedly
the lesson it has set itself to learn. But people too generally forget
that at best the parrot knows only the general application of a
sentence, not the separate meanings of its component words. It knows,
for example, that 'Polly wants a lump of sugar' is a phrase often
followed by a present of food. But to believe it can understand an
abstract expression, like the famous 'By Jove! what a beastly lot of
parrots!' is to confound learning by rote with genuine comprehension. A
careful review of all the evidence makes almost every scientific
observer conc