42 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
seven or eight minutes and resume his flying up 
and down with the others. It struck me that if I 
could have followed or kept them in sight to the 
finish I should probably have witnessed a little 
tragedy: the terror of the one and the fury of the 
other suggested such an end. The keen teeth once 
fixed in his victim’s neck, the noctule would wash 
his supper of moths and beetles down with a 
draught of warm blood, then drop the dead body 
to the earth before returning to his companions. 
This is conjecture; but we know that bats have 
carnivorous propensities, and that in some exotic 
kinds the big will kill the little, even their own 
young. Probably they all have something of the 
vampire in them. The female bat is a most devoted 
parent, carrying her young about when flying, 
wrapping them round with her silken wings as with 
a shawl when in repose, suckling them at her breast 
even as the highest of the mammalians do. One 
would not be surprised to learn that the deadliest 
enemy of her little ones, the one she fears most, is 
her own consort. 
Whether bats migrate or not has long been a 
moot question, and Millais, our latest authority, 
and certainly one of the best, has answered it in 
the affirmative. But the migration he describes 
is nothing but a change of locality—a retirement 
from their summer haunts to some spot suitable 
for hibernation, in some instances but a few miles 
distant. Other hibernating creatures—serpents, for 
example—have the same habit, and though com- 
