166 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bats catch night-butterflies, the parents of millions of noxious cater- 

 pillars, but, in default of a convenient cave, are apt to make their 

 headquarters in smoke-stacks, and thus incur the suspicion of bacon- 

 curing housewives : 



" Bat, bat, fly in my hat, 

 And I'll give you some bacon-fat," 



is the popular stanza, preluding a shower of whistling brickbats, if 

 the poor cheiropter ventures to leave his den before dark. And yet 

 the bona fide petting of bats would, in many countries, be the best 

 remedy of the mosquito-plague. There are few parts of Eastern Ar- 

 kansas where the utmost diligence in ditching and draining would 

 abate the torment of the perennial gnat-swarms, and in many swamp- 

 districts of Southern Mexico one might as well try to bar out rats 

 with a rail-fence as gnats with a mosquito-bar, since the forty or 

 fifty different varieties comprise several sizes that could slip through 

 the meshes of a cambric handkerchief, while the largest kind would 

 as easily bite through a flannel night-shirt. Yet in the midst of such 

 a swamp -delta I once passed a comfortable night in the loft of an old 

 cotton-mill. We had neither gauze-bars nor smoke-pots, but two large 

 louvres at opposite ends of the loft stood wide open, and all night the 

 whispering of the land-breeze mingled with the fluttering and the 

 clicking chirp of busy bats, but rarely as much as the incipient buzz 

 of a tipulary insect. 



The tenacity of the most preposterous tenets, as compared with 

 that of less irrational delusions, is curiously illustrated by two zoo- 

 logical superstitions which North America seems to have imported 

 from the northern nations of the Old World. A hundred years ago 

 nine out of ten American colonists believed firmly in the existence of 

 two remarkable vertebrates : the "joint-snake," a reptile gifted with 

 the faculty of joining and disjoining its organism like a combination 

 pen-holder ; and the "glutton," a " monstre able to devore the carcaes 

 of black cattle," as Sir Douglas of Glastonbury informs us. 



The latter superstition has been traced to a singular international 

 origin. The Norwegian I'jell-frit, or mountain-whelp, was mistaken 

 for a Viel-frass by the same nation that turned a reindeer into a 

 Rennthier ("race-beast "), and this incorrect "much-eater" was cor- 

 rectly translated into a French glouton and an English glutton, which 

 the Latinizcrs, with their penchant for "characteristics," specified as 

 a gulo luscxts, just as the wolf-fish, or sea-cat of the Scotch fishermen, 

 was made an anarrhichas, from a supposed dexterity in climbing rocks 

 by means of its jagged fins. Encouraged by a solecism thus well in- 

 dorsed, the first glutton-hunters of our continent reveled in miracle- 

 legends. 



"The Western trappers," says Colonel Ruxton ("Adventures in 

 Mexico and the Rocky Mountains," page 278), " give most wonderful 



