POSITION OF THE BAT. 239 



those divisions of the animal world ; while its striking dis- 

 similarity in many respects to both has led again to the resolute 

 denial that it belonged to either. The common English name of 

 "flitter mouse" clearly indicates the position which in the 

 popular estimation the Bat occupies. It is a veritable flying 

 mouse, the descendant, perhaps, of some ancient pilferer of 

 cheese, who, not content with cupboard life, and ambitious of 

 moving in a higher sphere, gradually became endowed with 

 those wonderful organs of flight by which the race are now 

 distinguished. 



The ancients very generally regarded the Bats as aves non 

 av?.s, birds yet not birds ; as though they were, what we some- 

 times still hear them described, " half bird and half beast." In 

 Hebrew the Bat is attaleph, the bird of darkness ; and in the 

 Book of Deuteronomy it is mentioned last in the list of unclean 

 birds prohibited as food. Pliny was evidently in doubt as to the 

 Bat, for though he classes it with birds, he does it as it were 

 under protest. " No flying fowle,"he says, " hath teeth, save only 

 the Bat or Winged Mouse :" and in his tenth book, at the end of 

 his discourse on Birds proper, he gives the Bat a short chapter 

 to itself, and tells us that the Eere-mouse or Bat, alone of all 

 creatures that fly, bringeth forth young alive," and that " she is 

 the only bird that suckleth her little ones with her paps and gives 

 them milk." The oddest notion with respect to the true position 

 of the Bat, is that of Aldrovandi, the celebrated naturalist of the 

 sixteenth century, who boldly struck out in a new path, and 

 classed it with the Ostrich. His idea was that as the Ostrich 

 was a bird, which, while unable to fly, could yet run like a quad- 

 ruped, and the Bat was apparently a quadruped which, unable to 

 walk or run like other quadrupeds, could yet fly like a bird, the 

 two might very properly take their place together as a special 

 class of mongrels or monstrosities. 



The peculiar organs of flight with which the Bats are provided 

 exhibit one of the most singular modifications of animal struc- 

 ture observable in the whole range of animated nature. Unlike 

 the wings of birds, which are formed by the feathery appendages 

 of the fore-limbs, these curious organs consist of a thin and 

 extremely delicate membrane, which is continued from the skin 

 of the body, and connected with all four of the limbs, and in 

 jnost cases with the tail as well. It is owing to the peculiar 



