WE A T ARE BATS? 531 



and against each other, pretending to bite, but never harming their companions 

 of the same species ; though I have seen them exhibit a sad spirit of persecution 

 to an unfortunate Barbastelle which was placed in the same cage with them. 

 They may be readily brought to eat from the hand, and my friend Mr. James 

 Sowerby had one which, when at liberty in the parlor, would fly to the hand of 

 any of the young people who held up a fly toward it, and, pitching on the hand, 

 take the fly without hesitation. If the insect were held between the lips, the 

 bat would then settle on its young patron's cheek, and take the fly with great 

 gentleness from the mouth ; and so far was this familiarity carried that, when 

 either of my young friends made a humming noise with the mouth in imitation 

 of an insect, the bat would search about the lips for the promised dainty." 



One of the "young friends" here referred to is now the esteemed 

 secretary at the Botanical Gardens, and he has assured me of the truth 

 of the anecdote. 



The cry of the bat is exceedingly shrill, so much so that some 

 persons' ears are quite unable to detect it. 



Homer compares the voices of the ghosts to the cries of bats. 

 In the twenty-fourth book of the " Odyssey," 6, he says: "As when 

 bats in a corner of a great cave, when one of them has fallen from off 

 the cluster so they (the ghosts) went along screaming." 



Or, as Pope gives it : 



'Trembling the spectres glide, and plaintive vent 

 Their hollow screams along the deep descent, 

 As in the cavern of some rifted den, 

 Where flock nocturnal bats, and birds obscene ; 

 Clustered they hang, till at some sudden shock 

 They move, and murmurs run through all the rock. 

 So cowering fled the sable heap of ghosts." 



Bats bring forth but one or two young ones at a birth when they 

 are received into the interfemoral membrane as into a cradle the 

 mother then hanging suspended not by her feet but by her thumbs. 



The young are born naked and blind, and are suckled at the breast 

 much as is the human infant. 



There are many kinds of bats, though their number is uncertain. 



There are some fourteen species even in England, and at least 

 three hundred and twenty, arranged in some seventy-nine genera, in 

 the world at large. 



One of our English bats, already referred to as "the long-eared 

 bat," does indeed merit its name, since it has relatively the largest 

 ears found in the whole animal kingdom, being about equal to the 

 length of its entire body. They are capable of being folded up, and 

 generally are so folded, during sleep. 



Another kind of bat found in England is called the leaf-nosed bat, 

 because in it not the ear but the nose is the seat of extraordinary 

 skin-development productions of skin curiously folded surrounding 

 and surmounting the external nostrils. 



