GREAT LARGE BAT. // 



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 w r hich 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 w r ater 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 hirundo 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 hirundines, and the larger bats, are supported by 

 some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phakence, 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, 

 first noticed and described by our author. KD. 

 n2 



