170 Mr. Moxtagu's Account of some Species of Bats. 



Circulating fluid by the arterial system? To assent tc the eon- 

 elusion which M. de Jurine has drawn from his experiments, that 

 the ears of Bats are more essential to their discovering objects than 

 their eyes, requires more faith, and less philosophic reasoning, 

 than can be expected of the zootomical philosopher, by whom it 

 might fairly be asked, Since Bats see with their ears, do they 

 hear with their eyes ? It will not be sufficient for these experi- 

 mentalists to inform us that the copious auricles of this class of 

 animals, or their delicate internal structure, are adequate to the 

 double purpose of seeing and hearing, when we perceive that 

 they are by nature provided with organs of sight similar 

 to what we not only feel most sensibly to be the most inesti- 

 mable of blessings, but also perceive to be the principal foun- 

 tains of locomotion in all other animals in the same scale of 

 beings. 



Although it cannot be admitted that the Almighty hand gave 

 to these creatures those most wonderfully constructed organs 

 of sight, without endowing them with visual properties, yet 

 it must be allowed that there is something extremely asto- 

 nishing and unaccountable in their unembarrassed flight in total 

 darkness, whether by sealing up their eyes, or by their natural 

 habits, of finding their way through all the smaller passages and 

 windings., into the inmost recesses of their subterraneous abode. 

 By what occult property they direct their course in total dark- 

 ness, is perhaps a problem of as difficult solution as that of a 

 swallow returning from the torrid to the frigid zone, to breed in 

 the same nest it had prepared the preceding year, and in which 

 it had performed those functions of nature. Can any human 

 understanding develop the cause that so unerringly directs the 

 carrier-pigeon to its place of nativity, when previously taken to 

 the distance of five hundred miles ? How is the bee instructed 



to 



