GREAT LARGE BAT. 77 



shire, for the reason I have given in the article of the white 

 hare. 



As a neighbour was lately ploughing in a dry chalky field, 

 far removed from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that 

 was curiously laid up in an hybernaculum artificially formed of 

 grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow lay above a gallon 

 of potatoes, regularly stowed, on which it was to have supported 

 itself for the winter. But the difficulty with me is, how this 

 amphibius mus came to fix its winter station at such a distance 

 from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place 

 by the mere accident of finding the potatoes which were planted 

 there ? or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to 

 forsake the neighbourhood of the water in the colder months ? 



Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing 

 how fallacious it is with respect to natural history ; yet, in the 

 following instance, I cannot help being inclined to think it 

 may conduce towards the explanation of a difficulty that I 

 have mentioned before, with respect to the invariable early 

 retreat of the kirundo apus, or swift, so many weeks before its 

 congeners ; and that not only with us, but also in Andalusia, 

 where they begin to retire about the beginning of August. 



The great large bat* (which, by the by, is at present a 

 nondescript in England, and what I have never been able yet 

 to procure) retires or migrates very early in the summer : it 

 also ranges very high for its food, feeding in a different region 

 of the air ; and that is the reason I never could procure one. ( 

 Now, this is exactly the case with the swifts ; for they take 

 their food in a more exalted region than the other species, and 

 are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the ground, or 

 over the surface of the water. From hence I would conclude, 

 that these kirundines, and the larger bats, are supported by 

 some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalcencB, that are 

 of short continuance ; and that the short stay of these strangers 

 is regulated by the defect of their food. 



the ciliatus, or fringe-tailed water-shrew : he says it is entirely black, 

 with hardly any white underneath. In Loudon's Magazine, there is a 

 description of a water shrew nearly double the size of thefodiens, and said 

 to be of a darker colour ED. 



* The little bat appears almost every month in the year ; but I have 

 never seen the large ones till the end of April, nor after July. They 

 are most common in June, but never in any plenty : are a rare species 

 with us. 



f This is the great bat, vespertilio noctula, of Turton's British Fauna y 

 first noticed and described by our author. ED. 



