114 



ON BATS 



taken to the distance of five hundred miles ? How is the 

 bee instructed to find ifs hive when raptured and taken to 

 a distance ? This is inexplicable, and yet no one will dis- 



Modeofffnd- pllte tJlc f act< Indeed the practice is common in some 



ing hives c( r r . 



wild bees. countries, :a order to find 'the wild hives ; for if two bees 



are taken near the same spot, and turned out at different 

 points, distant from each other a few hundred yards, if 

 belonging to the same hive, the two lines formed by the 

 direction of their flight will discover the hive to be at the 

 intersection of those lines. These are the mysteries of na- 

 ture, so impenetrable to the human mind, that we are lost 

 in a labyrinth of wonder at such instinctive endowments,, 

 which are incomprehensible to our limited faculties. We 

 have only attentively to examine the operations of nature, 

 and we shall find a thousand instances not less astonishing, 

 than that the bat should find its road without one single 

 fay of light to direct its course *. 



Vespertilio Barbastellus. 



Gmel. Syst. i. p. 48. Buffon. viii. p. 130. U 19. /. 1. 

 Pennant Quadr. ii. p» 56 1. Shaw Zool. i. p. 133. 

 Brit. Miscellany, t. v. 



fbund^En US Tnls s P ecies nas lon g keen known to te an inhabitant of 

 land. . some parts of the European continent, especially France, 



but, I believe, had not been discovered to inhabit England 

 till the year 1800, when I first noticed it to be indigenous 

 to the south of Devon, and had prepared an account of it 

 for the Linnean Society. Since that period others have 

 occurred in the same county ; and we are informed in the 

 British Miscellany, that it has been taken in the powder- 

 mill at Dartford in K«it. 



The figure and description given in that work are highly 

 satisfactory; but as it is a newly discovered quadruped in 



Teats net * Since l ^ e P"" ece di^g account was written, several of both these spe- 



perceptible. ci« of bats have been collected from the same cavern, and in one of the 

 v.minutut the abdominal papillae were more conspicuous than in the 

 former j but not the least vestige of such could be found in the v. Ferrut, 

 ■':uinum: it should, however, be remarked, that in these the pectoral 

 teats were equally invisible. 



this 



