x. FLITTERMICE. 143 



scramble down for a date or piece of fig, which he will 

 carry up with him and devour, hanging by one leg and 

 holding the fruit between the claws and opposable thumb 

 of the other. These " flying-foxes " are larger than their 

 insect-eating relatives, attaining a length of nearly a foot 

 with an expanse of wings exceeding three feet. I have 

 never had an opportunity of visiting the flying-fox in his 

 native haunts Southern Asia and the neighbouring 

 islands. But those who have seen Pteropus at home do 

 not seem to give him the highest character for amiability 

 or respectability. Sir J. Emerson Tennent, in his " Natural 

 History of Ceylon," says that when they return from their 

 morning excursions they are constantly wrangling and 

 contending angrily for the most shady and comfortable 

 places in which to hang for the rest of the day. In the 

 evening, too, as they return from the feeding-grounds they 

 wrangle again over the food they have collected, biting 

 each other snappishly, and tearing one another with their 

 sharp curved claws, especially the long hook>like claw of 

 the thumb with which they strike out viciously. Nor is 

 this all. Strict vegetarians though they be, or pretend to 

 be, these frugivorous bats are, according to Mr. Francis 

 Day, exceedingly intemperate and disgracefully dissipated. 

 They often, he assures us, and he is not the only witness 

 against them, pass the night drinking the toddy from the 

 chatties of the cocoa-nut trees, which results either in their 

 returning home in the early morning in a state of extreme 

 and riotous intoxication, or in being found the next day at 

 the foot of the trees sleeping off the effects of their mid- 

 night carouse. 



Let us return from these sad revellers of the night to 

 the better-behaved flittermice of our more temperate 

 latitudes. 



There are several species of British bats, some twenty 



