Ill 
BATS 
THE bat was formerly looked upon as an uncanny 
sort of bird, and described as such in the old 
natural histories. Oh, those ever delightful old 
natural histories, and the vision of the wise old 
naturalist examining a recently-taken specimen 
through his horn-bound spectacles, and setting it 
gravely down in his books that it is the only known 
bird which was clothed in fur in place of feathers! 
Or, as Plinius puts it, the only bird which brings 
forth and suckles its young, just as we say that the 
Australian water-mole is the only mammal which 
lays eggs. The modern ornithologist will have 
nothing to do with the creature; but after his 
expulsion from the feathered nation it was his 
singular good fortune not to sink lower in the 
scale; he was, on the contrary, raised to the 
mammalians, or quadrupeds, as our fathers called 
them; then on the discovery being made that he 
was anatomically related to the lemurs, he was 
eventually allotted a place in our systems next 
after that ancient order of fox-faced monkeys. 
And thus it has come to pass that when some 
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