242 DIURNAL RETREATS. 



account, and they are sometimes found snugly stowed away in 

 the most unlikely situations. Mr. Crouch of Polperro men- 

 tions that in a church in that neighbourhood some marks of a 

 Bat having been found on the floor, immediately under an iron 

 helmet fixed against the wall at a considerable elevation, a roll of 

 flaming sulphur was held below the helmet, when no less than 

 seventeen Bats made their way out and escaped ; and that some 

 time previously, when the roof of the same church was being 

 repaired, as many Bats were caught as would hav.e filled a wheel- 

 barrow. In favourable situations these animals nestle away 

 durin"' the daytime in great numbers ; and it is no uncommon 

 circumstance in the dusk of a summer evening to find a cat 

 attentively watching the entrance to one of these favourite re- 

 treats, ready to pounce upon the poor Bats the moment they 

 emerge. Moreover, they have no sooner got clear of this enemy, 

 and begun their giddy round, than they are exposed to another 

 and still more dangerous foe, in the shape of the Owl, which 

 seems to have quite as great a partiality for Bats as mice. 



Within the tropics, where the Bat tribe attains its greatest 

 development, both as to size and numbers, the spectacle they 

 afford in the retreats to which they retire by day is often of the 

 most singular character. A writer in the " Zoologist " for 1859, 

 states that in the limestone caves of Jamaica the Bats are found 

 by day in immense numbers, and that when they are disturbed 

 by the entrance of people with lights, the noise of their wings 

 sounds like the murmur of a distant sea. In one case the sides 

 and roof, of a cave half a mile in extent, were crowded with a Bat 

 of large size, which brings into its domicile incredible quantities 

 of the kernels and fragments of large fruits on which it feeds, 

 and which, with the droppings of the animals themselves, form 

 deposits several feet in thickness over the entire floor of the cave. 

 The horror of the scene is greatly enhanced by the fact that a 

 sickly crop of young colourless plants struggle upwards in the 

 darkness, while vast numbers of a large wingless insect, allied to 

 the cockroach, feed on the decaying matter, and themselves form 

 the prey of huge spiders, with formidable jaws, like the claws 

 of the scorpion, which slowly creep along the walls. 



But the most curious scenes of this kind are those afforded by 

 the assemblages of the great fruit-eating Bats of India and the 

 Indian Archipelago the Flying Foxes of Europeans which ma 



