With all the mass media attention on Dr. Lilly's dolphin dialogues, the contemporary mutants of the story of Dr. Dolittle, the lambent theorizing of Morris, Lorenz, Ardrey, this is a very good year for popular treatises on meaningful grunts and chirps among the lower orders. Dr. Evans, a research biologist and zoologist, has turned out a neat little volume which outlines simply and entertainingly, methods, mechanisms and structures for communication among aquatic invertebrates and fishes, insects, reptiles, and amphibians, birds, land and aquatic mammals, and primates. The organization is orderly and easily followed; the examples are sprinkled about with taste and discretion. Frogs cheep in threes; queen bees, frustrated by workers from ""mass regicide"" toot their protests to a wave length of ten feet from the hive: the silent sea is as noisy as a rush hour expressway: the charting of a low-intensity gorilla roar (a roller coaster plot of ""u u u's"") is a handy guide for the bush, and the ""yawn"" of a chimp means troublement rather than ennui. Dr. Evans, sensibly, does not bait the lure with the possibility of talking to the animals, but his stylish propulsion through natural wonders is hypnotic. A fine primer of finny feelers and basic beeps.