CHEIROPTERA. 
35 
the tip of the tail. This animalis also nocturnal in its habits, and very 
sluggish in its motions by day, at which time it usually hangs from a 
branch suspended .by its fore hands, its mottled back assimilating 
closely with the rugged bark of the tree; it is exclusively herbivorous, 
possessing a very voluminous stomach, and long convoluted intestines. 
Wallace says of it, that its brain is very small, and it possesses such 
tenacity of life that it is very difficult to kill; he adds that it is said to 
have only one at a birth, and one he shot had a very small blind naked 
little creature clinging closely to its breast, which was quite bare and much 
wrinkled. Raffles, however, gives two as the number produced at each 
birth, Dr. Cantor says that in confinement plantains constitute the 
favourite food, but deprived of liberty it soon dies. In its wild state it 
“lives entirely on young fruits and leaves ; those of the cocoanut and 
Bombax pentandrum are its favourite food, and it commits great injury to 
the plantations of these.”’—/orsfield@’s ‘Cat. Mam.’ Regarding its 
powers of flight, Wallace, in his ‘Travels in the Malay Archipelago,’ 
says: “I saw one of these animals run up a tree in a rather open 
space, and then glide obliquely through the air to another tree on 
which it alighted near its base, and immediately began to ascend. I 
paced the distance from one tree to the other, and found it to be seventy 
yards, and the amount of descent not more than thirty-five or forty feet, 
or less than one in five. This, I think, proves that the animal must 
have some power of guiding itself through the air, otherwise in so 
long a distance it would have little chance of alighting exactly upon the 
trunk.” 
There is a carefully prepared skeleton of this animal in the Indian 
Museum in Calcutta. 
ORDER -CARNARTIA: 
CHEIROPTERA. 
Ir may seem strange to many that such an insignificant, weird little 
creature as a bat shouldrank so high in the animal kingdom as to be 
but a few removes fromman. It has, however, some striking anatomical 
affinities with the last Order, Quadrumana, sufficient to justify its being 
placed in the next link of the great chain of creation. 
“‘ Bats have the arms, fore-arms and fingers excessively elongated, so 
as to form with the membrane that occupies their intervals, real wings, 
the surface of which is equally or more extended than in those of birds. 
Hence they fly high and with great rapidity."—Cwwer. They suckle 
D2 
