The case of a pet thrasher was almost as striking. It is true, he may have heard several of his kin singing about the premises during the first spring of his captivity, but it is not probable that he learned their melodies so early in life. As the next spring approached, he began to sing the very medleys that the wild thrashers sing with so much earnestness and skill, and this was long before any thrashers had come back from the South. I must now describe several cases in which inherited instinct did not prove so true a teacher. A young robin was once given me by a friend, and was kept by myself and others until the following summer. Strange as it may seem, he never acquired the well-known robin carol. Sometimes there were vague hints of it in his vocal performances, but for the most part he whistled strains in a loud, shrill tone that no wild robin ever dreamed of inflicting on the world. They were more like crude human efforts at whistling than anything else. Indeed, I think they were picked up from the whistling he heard about the house. Some of his strains were very sweet, and all of them were wonderful for a bird. A friend played "Yankee Doodle" on a cornet, and Master 'Rastus--for that was his name--gave a very fair and funny imitation of part of the air. There were many robins caroling in the trees about the premises, and 'Rastus was often left out of doors among them, but he never acquired the red-breast minstrelsy. A similar instance was that of a pet red-winged blackbird, which, instead of whistling the labored "Grook-o-lee" of his species, learned to mimic all kinds of sounds in and out of the house, among them the crowing of the cocks of the barnyard. These two instances would indicate that some birds must at least be associated with their kin in order to learn the songs of their species. My comical pet blue jay gave proof of the need of parental training. While he intuitively called like a jay, he never was able to sing the sweet, gurgling roulade of the wild jays. On the contrary, he treated us to all kinds of odd, imitative, mirth-provoking performances that no self-respecting jay in the open would think of enacting. After several months of cage life he was given his liberty. Now, indeed, he showed his lack of jay bringing up, and how little, in some respects, mere instinct can be relied on. When evening came he perched on a limb of the maple tree before the house, in a place as exposed as he could well find, not knowing that there was more danger in an outdoor roost than in his shielding cage. I could not induce him to come down, nor could I climb out to the branch on which he sat, and so I was compelled to leave him out of doors.