CHAPTER II 



ALARM-NOTES 



If any particular kind of vocal utterance had been 

 of aid in combat, it would, in a comparatively short 

 period, have become general in the species by which 

 it was employed. 



A combat-cry might well be uttered before the 

 commencement of a fight, and it would then be 

 virtually a defiance, and, in the neighbourhood of 

 assembled animals, it might answer the purposes of 

 an alarm-note. We may be sure that such a cry 

 would have been acted upon, since, among warm- 

 blooded animals, alarm-cries are of almost universal 

 comprehension. Birds in a thicket become sus- 

 picious when some distant individual of even another 

 genus utters an alarm. I remember a marked in- 

 stance of this habit, in which several birds of distinct 

 genera — tits, nuthatches, goldcrests, and tree-creepers 

 — gathered around a coaltit which, alarmed at the 



