2IO VESPERTILIONID.E— BARBASTELLA 



keeper at the Tearaght, one of the most desolate and in- 

 accessible of all the Irish islets, some eight miles off the coast 

 of Kerry, at so late a date as 4th November 1891 ^ ; and Mr 

 J. F. Fortune, light-keeper at Aranmore, off the Donegal 

 coast, wrote me that one made its appearance at his lantern 

 on 24th September 1899. 



The Long-eared Bat, once clearly seen either at rest or on 

 the wing, can never be mistaken for any other species. The 

 ears, although approached at a great distance by those of 

 Bechstein's Bat, are unique amongst British mammals.^ 



Genus BARBASTELLA. 



1 82 1. BARBASTELLA, J. E. Gray, London Medical Repository^ xv., 300; based on 



Vespertilio barbastellus of Schreber. 

 1829. Barbastellus, Jakob Kaup, Systetn der Europdischen Thierwelt, i., 96 ; based 



on Vespertilio barbastellus of Schreber. 

 1839. Synotus, a. Graf von Keyserling and J. H. Blasius, Wiegmann's Archiv fiir 



Naturgeschichte, i., 305 ; based on Vespertilio barbastellus of Schreber. 



Synonymy: — The earliest generic name known to have been 

 applied to the Barbastelle is certainly Barbastella of Gray, a 

 name revived by Mr Miller in 1897 i^^^^^- and Mag. Nat. Hist., 

 Oct. 1897, 384-385). It clearly antedates both i5^r^^i^/^/6^5 and 

 Synotus, the former of which has to meet the additional objec- 

 tion that, as pointed out by Dobson {Catalogue of Chiroptera, 

 175, footnote), it was in the first instance applied to a species 

 of Nyctophilus. 



This small and distinct genus includes only one British 

 species, the Barbastelle, B. barbastellus. 



The distribution is imperfectly known, but extends at least 

 from Skandinavia to Abyssinia, Egypt (Heuglin, Reise in Nord- 

 ost A/rika, ii., 30, 1877), and Arabia, where the local form was 

 named leucomelas by Riippell {Atlas zur de^^- Reise ini n'drd- 

 lichen A/rika, ^2)^ P^- xxviii. B, 1826); and from Great Britain 

 to Assam, where the representative is Hodgson's darjeling- 

 ensis, a common mountain bat of the Himalayas, ascending 



^ R. M. Barrington, The Migration of Birds, 284 ; R. H. Porter, London, 1900. 



^ Since the above article was written, Oldfield Thomas has described P. wardi, 

 a large pale-coloured form, from Leh, Ladak, Kashmir {Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., 

 19x1, 209) ; and P. ariel, allied to P. wardi but of much darker colour, from Ta-tsien- 

 lu, Szechwan, Western China {Abst. Zool. Soc. (London), 7th February 191 1, 3). 



