Tree lizards will listen completely entranced to the music of a good whistler, and will allow themselves to be captured while thus inthralled. Some lizards are fairly good musicians themselves, notably the tree lizards of the East Tennessee mountains. I have repeatedly heard them singing on the slopes of Chilhowie and adjacent peaks.
Burroughs writes very entertainingly of a singing lizard, or, rather, salamander: "... Approach never so cautiously the spot from which the sound proceeds and it instantly ceases, and you may watch for an hour without hearing it again. 'Is it a frog,' I said—'the small tree-frog, the piper of the marshes—repeating his spring note but little changed amid the trees?' Doubtless it is, but I must see him in the very act. So I watched and waited, but to no purpose, till one day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I heard the sound proceeding from the leaves at my feet. Keeping entirely quiet, the little musician presently emerged, and lifting himself up on a small stick, his throat palpitated, and the plaintive note again came forth. 'The queerest frog that ever I saw,' said a youth who accompanied me and whom I had enlisted to help solve the mystery. No, it was no frog or toad at all, but the small red salamander commonly called lizard."[64]
The sound of the piccolo is very pleasing to these little creatures, and I have frequently collected about me as many as ten or a dozen by sounding this instrument in the still depths of a wood which I knew these salamanders frequented.
Certain snakes are very susceptible to the charm of harmonious tonal vibration; witness the performance of the Hindu snake charmer, who, while handling that deadly poisonous creature, the cobra-de-capello, plays continuously on flageolets, fifes, or other musical instruments.[65] I, myself, have often held tree lizards completely entranced until grasped in my hand, by whistling shrilly and continuously.
I remember, on one occasion, when I was quite young, that a large black snake crawled through a ventilating hole in the wall of the "quarters" or row of brick cottages occupied by the negroes, and took shelter beneath the floor. It was seen by myself and some of my dusky playmates, who immediately carried the tidings to the negro gardener. He called one of the hands from the field, and, after placing him with a loaded shotgun at one side of the hole in the wall, took his station just behind him and commenced to play on his fiddle. In a few moments the snake came out, and was killed by the discharge of the gun in the hands of the other negro. I have been informed, time and again, by negroes that they could charm snakes from their holes with music, but the instance related above is the only one of the snake being led to its death by the bewitching power of musical sounds that has ever come under my immediate personal observation.
Before dismissing the subject of the influence of music on animals, I wish to call attention to the fact that Romanes declares that pigeons and parrots evince an æsthetic enjoyment of musical sounds.
"Moreover," writes he, "the pleasure which birds manifest in musical sounds is not always restricted to the sounds which they themselves produce."
Bingley quotes John Lockman, the celebrated composer, who declares that he once saw a pigeon which could distinguish a particular air. Lockman was visiting a Mr. Lee in Cheshire, whose daughter was a fine pianist, "and whenever she played the air of Speri si from Handel's opera of 'Admetus,' a pigeon would descend from an adjacent dovecot to the window of the room where she sat, 'and listen to the air apparently with the most pleasing emotions,' always returning to the dovecot immediately the air was finished. But it was only this one air that would induce the bird to behave in this way."[66]
A correspondent writes me that he has a cock which is passionately fond of the sound of the violin. This bird always flies to the window of the music-room as soon as he hears the sound of the violin, where he will quietly remain perched as long as the music continues. As soon as the music ceases, he flies down from the window.
Horses very frequently show an appreciation for musical sounds, especially when they are produced by a band of brasses.