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same order again and again, but, as if inspired, in a changed order, with variations and new sounds: and here again it has some resemblance to the skylark's song, and might be described as the lark's song with endless variations and brightened and spiritualized in a degree that cannot be imagined.
White-banded mocking-bird.
This mocking-bird is one of those species that accompany music with appropriate motions. And just as its song is, so to speak, inspired and an im-provization, unlike any song the bird has ever uttered, so its motions all have the same character of spontaneity, and follow no order, and yet have a grace and passion and a perfect harmony with the
278 The Naturalist in La Plata.
music unparalleled among birds possessing a similar habit. While singing he passes from bush to bush, sometimes delaying a few moments on and at others just touching the summits, and at times sinking out of sight in the foliage: then, in an access of rapture, soaring vertically to a height of a hundred feet, with measured wing-beats, like those of a heron: or, mounting suddenly in a wild, hurried zigzag, then slowly circling downwards, to sit at last with tail outspread fanwise, and vans, glistening white in the sunshine, expanded and vibrating, or waved languidly up and down, with, a motion like that of some broad-winged butterfly at rest on a flower.
I wish now to put this question: What relation that we can see or imagine to the passion of love and the business of courtship, have these dancing and vocal performances in nine cases out of ten? In such cases, for instance, as that of the scissors-tail tyrant-bird, and its pyrotechnic evening displays, when a number of couples leave their nests containing eggs and young to join in a wild aerial dance: the mad exhibitions of ypecahas and ibises, and the jacanas' beautiful exhibition of grouped wings: the triplet dances of the spur-winged lapwing, to perform which two birds already mated are compelled to call in a third bird to complete the set: the harmonious duets of the oven-birds, and the duets and choruses of nearly all the wood-hewers, and the wing-slapping aerial displays of the whistling widgeons--will it be seriously contended that the female of this species makes choice of the