Ornithological and Other Oddities 



send a man all the way from Kabul to Calcutta 

 to examine it, and was convinced that it was the 

 legendary "huma" of Eastern tradition. 



The weird creatures which annoyed the 

 gatherers of cassia might well have been the 

 great fruit-bats of the East, probably bolder in 

 those days than they would dare to be now, 

 when they seem never to take the offensive on 

 being disturbed. The aquatic habitat assigned 

 to them and to the plant is wrong ; but the latter 

 is at any rate a reality, being identified with the 

 cinnamon laurel. And as to the supposed 

 ferocity of its bat-like guardians, it is not so 

 very long, comparatively speaking, that Linnaeus 

 credited the above-mentioned " flying -foxes," 

 which certainly do "screech horribly," as Hero- 

 dotus makes them, with being blood-sucking 

 vampires, a menace to poultry-yards and sleep- 

 ing slaves. It was not till Darwin travelled in 

 Chile that the real vampire-bat was brought to 

 book and given a local habitation. 



It is thus possible that some at least of our 

 author's wonderful travellers' tales have a founda- 

 tion in fact ; where his real delinquencies lie is 

 in accounts of more familiar animals. The 

 lioness, for instance, is not so desperately un- 

 prolific as only to produce one cub during her 

 lifetime, supposed to sterilise her by the action 



of its sharp claws on the walls of the uterus. 



260 



