INSTINCTS OF RED DEER. 79 



Besides the acute sense of smell with which 

 these animals are endowed, enabling them to 

 detect the slightest taint in the air to the wind- 

 ward of their position, they possess other gifts in 

 a remarkable degree, by the exercise of which they 

 succeed in avoiding danger, and this frequently at 

 the very moment when escape would appear to be 

 most improbable. 



Foremost among these is their power of recog- 

 nizing the sound, or cry, of alarm uttered by 

 various native birds of the forest, and of appre- 

 ciating the difference between this and the ordinary 

 voice or call-note of the species. There would 

 seem to be no link of attachment between the 

 animal that confers and the one that receives the 

 benefit, which appears to me to characterize the 

 exercise of this faculty in the red deer and to 

 distinguish the case itself from others which at 

 first sight might appear to be analogous. 



The author of that charming book, " The 

 Monasteries of the Levant," had the enviable good 

 fortune, while stalking a crocodile on the banks of 

 the Nile, to corroborate the accuracy of Herodotus's 

 account of a singular episode in its biography, 

 which for upwards of two thousand years had 

 been looked upon as apocryphal. When within a 

 few yards of the sleeping monster, and just as ho 



