40 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST . 
struck by its shrinking, shivering motions, the 
tremors that passed over it like wave following 
wave, and it has seemed to me that the touch of 
a soft finger-tip on its wing was to the bat like a 
blow of a cheese- or bread-grater on his naked body 
to a man. 
Now any one, even the intelligent foreigner from 
Aldebaran, would have imagined that such a 
creature so constructed would not have main- 
tained its existence in this rough world: a sudden 
storm of rain or hail encountered in mid-air would 
have destroyed it, and in its pursuit of insects in 
leafy places it would have been exposed every 
minute to disabling accidents. But it did not 
happen so. That exquisite super-sensitiveness, that 
extra sense, or extra senses, since we do not know 
how many there are, not only kept it in the air, 
able to continue the struggle of life in the particular 
forest, the district, the region, the continent where 
it came into being, but sent it abroad, an invader 
and colonist, to other lands, other continents all 
over the globe, including those far-off isolated 
islands which had been cut off from all connexion 
with the rest of the earth before mammalian life 
was evolved, and had no higher life than birds, 
until this small beast came flying over the illimit- 
able ocean on his wings, to be followed a million 
years later by his noble relation in a canoe. 
We see then that the bat is a very wonderful 
creature, one of Nature’s triumphs and master- 
pieces, and on this account he has received a good 
