168 ON THE NEW-GUINEA MAMMALS. 



be looked upon as an exception, we may be sure that 

 in other lands of Europe there are numerous other 

 forms, so that we may accept as a matter of fact that in 

 Europe there is living an enormous number of local 

 forms of the Common Hare. It would be a needless over- 

 loading of our brains, a kind of psychological exercise, 

 good for nothing, to give a name to each of these kindred 

 forms. It too would have not in the least a scientific 

 value! Scientific is: to conclude that the Common Hare 

 or Lepus europaeus is not a constant thing but a very 

 varying "conception"; scientific is: to study the reasons 

 for those endless variations, in one word: the "why" 

 and "how". 



After this urgent deviation let us return to our subject. 

 Dobsonia paliata hardly can be confounded with another 

 animal, so very simple and typical are its characteristics ; 

 it enjoys itself in a very extensive geographical distri- 

 bution, living in all the large and small islands from the 

 north of Celebes to Timor and eastwards to New-Britain, 

 New-Ireland and d'Entrecasteaux-islauds ; the bat may be 

 eaten here and there, it is not a common food, so that 

 there is for the natives no reason to bring it over from 

 one island to the other, moreover it is very fatal for 

 the crop. We apparently can find an explication for 

 this enormous area of distribution by accepting that these 

 hundreds of large and small islands in former geological 

 periods formed part of one very large island, at least as broad 

 as Australia ; this enormous island having been split into 

 small parts, it is evident that our bats came under other 

 conditions, being isolated from other islands, and therefore 

 often forced to live upon other food, under other climato- 

 logical conditions a. s. o., so that in process of time they 

 must present differences in size and color a. s. o. And 

 that this in reality is so, may be proved by the following 

 list of measures taken from 40 adult specimens of paliata, 

 collected in 18 islands. — The letters a, 6, a. s. o. correspond 

 with the same in the Catalogue du Muséum d'Histoire 



Notes from tbe Leyden Museum, "Vol. XXVIII. 



