nimals that has hardly
been touched upon as yet, and that will be especially interesting with
reference to Families. The voices of animals have a family character not
to be mistaken. All the Canidae bark and howl: the Fox, the Wolf, the
Dog have the same kind of utterance, though on a somewhat different
pitch. All the Bears growl, from the White Bear of the Arctic snows to
the small Black Bear of the Andes. All the Cats _miau_, from our quiet
fireside companion to the Lions and Tigers and Panthers of the forest
and jungle. This last may seem a strange assertion; but to any one who
has listened critically to their sounds and analyzed their voices,
the roar of the Lion is but a gigantic _miau_, bearing about the same
proportion to that of a Cat as its stately and majestic form does to the
smaller, softer, more peaceful aspect of the Cat. Yet, notwithstanding
the difference in their size, who can look at the Lion, whether in his
more sleepy mood as he lies curled up in the corner of his cage, or in
his fiercer moments of hunger or of rage, without being reminded of a
Cat? And this is not merely the resemblance of one carnivorous animal to
another; for no one was ever reminded of a Dog or Wolf by a Lion. Again,
all the Horses and Donkeys neigh; for the bray of the Donkey is only a
harsher neigh, pitched on a different key, it is true, but a sound of
the same character,--as the Donkey himself is but a clumsy and dwarfish
Horse. All the Cows low, from the Buffalo roaming the prairie, the
Musk-Ox of the Arctic ice-fields, or the Jack of Asia, to the Cattle
feeding in our pastures. Among the Birds, this similarity of voice in
Families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy
Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example
the web-footed Family,--do not all the Geese and the innumerable host
of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it
be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of
the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw
that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the
sweet warblers of the Songster Family,--the Nightingales, the Thrushes,
the Mocking-Birds, the Robins; they differ in the greater or less
perfection of their note, but the same kind of voice runs through the
whole group. These affinities of the vocal systems among animals form a
subject well worthy of the deepest study, no