Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
Many naturalists believe that the singing of birds is almost exclusively "the effect of rivalry and emulation," and not for the sake of charming their mates. This was the opinion of Daines Barrington and White of Selborne, who both especially attended to this subject. 'Philosophical Transactions, 1773, p. 263.
Daines Barrington, the naturalist of the last century, to whom White of Selborne addressed so many of his letters, gives a table of the comparative merit of seventeen leading song-birds of Europe, marking them under the heads of mellowness, sprightliness, plaintiveness, compass, and execution.
Daines Barrington, famous for his association with Gilbert White, and others whom Boswell noted as men of distinction, but whose names are no more than names at this distance.
At this period he made the discovery, or what he held to be the discovery, which governed his whole future career. He laid down the principle which was to give the clue to all his investigations; and, as he thought, required only to be announced to secure universal acceptance. When Bentham revolted against the intellectual food provided at school and college, he naturally took up the philosophy which at that period represented the really living stream of thought. To be a man of enlightenment in those days was to belong to the school of Locke. Locke represented reason, free thought, and the abandonment of prejudice. Besides Locke, he mentions Hume, Montesquieu, Helvétius, Beccaria, and Barrington. Helvétius especially did much to suggest to him his leading principle, and upon country trips which he took with his father and step-mother, he used to lag behind studying Helvétius' De l'Esprit. Locke, he says in an early note (1773-1774), should give the principles, Helvétius the matter, of a complete digest of the law. He mentions with especial interest the third volume of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature for its ethical views: 'he felt as if scales fell from his eyes' when he read it. Daines Barrington's Observations on the Statutes interested him by miscellaneous suggestions. The book, he says, was a 'great treasure. 'It is everything,
The Honourable Daines Barrington, who published the Anglo-Saxon version, with an English translation, informs us that the original MS. is in the Cotton Library, Tiberius I., and is supposed to have been written in the ninth or tenth century; but that, in making his translation, he used a transcript, made by Mr Elstob, occasionally collated with the Cotton MS. and with some other transcripts.
Since this paper was written I have three times heard the wood wagtail's true song in the morning, but in neither case was the bird in the air. See p. 284. See the paper of Daines Barrington in Philosophical Transactions for 1773; also, Darwin's Descent of Man, and Wallace's Natural Selection.
Probably John Howard, whom, as we have seen in the essay on "Christ's Hospital," Lamb did not love. He was of singular sallowness. Daines Barrington. Indeed it was Barrington who inspired that work: a circumstance which must atone for his exterminatory raid on the Temple sparrows. His Chambers were at 5 King's Bench Walk. Barrington became a Bencher in 1777 and died in 1800.
Moreover, no philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps. See some good remarks on this head by Prof. Whitney, in his 'Oriental and Linguistic Studies, 1873, p. 354. Hon. Daines Barrington in 'Philosoph. Transactions, 1773, p. 262. See also Dureau de la Malle, in 'Ann. des. Sc.
"The Hon. Daines Barrington placed three young linnets with three different foster-parents, the skylark, the woodlark, and the titlark or meadow-pipit, and each adopted, through imitation, the song of its foster-parent."
His cheeks were colourless, even to whiteness. I know that he did good acts, but I could never make out what he was. Contemporary with these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington another oddity he walked burly and square in imitation, I think, of Coventry howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking