Descriptions of East Asiatic Mammals 69 
usual things. The bony pelvis of some Fruit Bats is not closed 
in front but is elastic and bounded by ligaments. This permits 
large embryos to be developed and new-born baby Bats to be 
precociously large compared with those of most other sorts of 
animals. Furthermore, except in a very few, possibly primitive 
species, only one baby Bat is born and raised at a time. Such 
oversized single young, though almost constantly carried about 
by the mother, need her care for a comparatively short while. 
They soon learn to fly. 
An astonishingly large number of different genera and species 
of Bats are known. Those of the Orient can be sorted into no 
less than six families, of very unequal size ; some families con- 
tain but a handful of genera, others very many. The families 
are grouped into two suborders, the Megachiroptera or Fruit 
Bats and the Microchiroptera or Insect-eating Bats. These two 
divisions, in their turn, combine to form the Order Chiroptera, 
or merely "The Bats." The subordinal names are not very ap- 
propriate. The Fruit Bats, it is true, contain only species that 
eat vegetable matter but the Insect-eating Bats include both 
fruit- and insect-eating Bats and even those with carnivorous 
and sanguivorous predilections. If we think only of "Mega-" 
and "Micro-," big and little Bats, we also run into diffi- 
culties, for some of the "big" Bats are smaller than some 
of the "little" Bats. If you examine a Bat's grinding or cheek 
teeth, you can always tell to which group it belongs. The Order 
Chiroptera, which contains all Bats, is better named; the word 
means "hand-winged." 
When studying Bats, some important things to note are the 
characters of the ears, the shapes of the nasal appendages if pres- 
ent, the shape of the wings and the proportions of the fingers to 
each other, the character of the tail and hind limbs, and whether 
the wing membranes extend to include the tail. 
One of the most helpful pieces of information, when distin- 
guishing very closely related species from each other, is the 
