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CHAPTER I. 



THE ORDER OF CHEIROPTERA — SUPERSTITIOUS DREAD OF BATS — THEIR USEFULNESS — THEIR FLY- 

 ING APPARATUS — THEIR GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND HABITS— THE GENERA OF THE 

 ORDER. 



WE have hitherto been describing strange creatures which are 

 not native to our country, and of which living specimens are 

 seen by us only as prisoners in the cages of menageries, or 

 as beggars accompanying some itinerant organ-grinder. The order of 

 which we are now about to treat is one of which some of the members 

 are well known to all our readers. In the summer days, as the sun 

 declines, the bats begin to come out from the recesses where they have 

 hidden themselves from the garish light of the sun. As the darkness 

 deepens their numbers increase, and when night has come they are all 

 busv, wheeling in their strange intermittent flight, as they pursue their 

 insect prey. They seem to be half birds and half mammals, and to forni 

 a link between these classes. For a long time, indeed, they were re- 

 garded as birds. Moses describes them as " fowls that creep, going upon 

 all fours," and adds that they are to be " an abomination." Aristotle 

 defines bats to be birds with wings of skin, and his authority gave cur- 

 rency to this view of their relationship till comparatively modern times. 

 The bats, however, have no other resemblance to birds than that they 

 can fly. 



But while philosophers agreed in calling the bats birds, the unedu- 

 cated classes, who knew nothing of theory and were guided by their own 

 observations, seem everywhere in Europe to have regarded them in their 

 true light, as a form of mammal. The French name them " the bald 

 shrew mouse "; the Spaniards, the " blind mouse "; to the German they 

 are " fledermause "; to the English peasant, the " flittermouse," or the 

 mouse that flits or flutters. 

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