We should, however, confine the subject in the boundary of far too close a fancy if it were imagined that sound was the only way in which speech and intercourse may pass among these humble creatures. Human beings naturally gather up that idea by living themselves in an atmosphere of which they agitate the waves for objects of mutual communication. No scientific Bee or highly educated Ant, if such creatures were possible, seeing and hearing men and women talk to each other, would dream that they could equally well exchange thoughts by making marks upon paper, or send their messages of love and business by seas and lands through a quivering wire. Nay, if report is to be believed, we are soon to be able to transmit, at a flash over long distances, a face, a map, a plan, a picture, a whole page of a newspaper, or an actual scene. As, therefore, those lower creatures, if they indeed could hear us speak, would have no notion of how we make the air waves into words, and still less grasp knowledge of any subtler form among human intercourse, so it is not quite safe for man to think and call all these strange families of the silent world alike dumb, or to despise them for being free of grammars and dictionaries. As a matter of fact, it is obvious that some power of mutual communication assuredly comes to all creatures that live in societies. Nobody can watch the flight of a flock of birds, the behavior of a herd of cattle, or, lower down, the marvelous accommodations for common existence of the small creeping and flying things, without perceiving that they know each other's minds in some way or other in a very satisfactory manner. Evidently there is, to begin with, a common language--a _lingua franca_--of the fields and of the forests. All sportsmen know how the particular cry of a frightened bird will put all the wild animals on the alert who would otherwise quite disregard the bird's ordinary note. And the evil success with which poachers can imitate the cries of love and defiance from denizens of the woodlands, proves that its inhabitants possess a vocabulary which can be stolen.