46 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
to use the hooked claw on the wing to scratch the 
gum away and pull the eyelids open, and when- 
ever one came to grief I found that its lids had not 
been opened. 
One can see at once that an experiment of this 
kind is useless. The irritation of the gum and the 
efforts being made to remove it by the animal while 
flying cloud the extra sense or senses, and it loses 
its efficiency. 
What the bat can do I discovered by chance one 
summer afternoon in an English lane. It was one 
of those deep Hampshire lanes one finds between 
Selborne and Prior’s Dean, where I was walking 
just before sunset, when two common bats appeared 
flying up and down the lane in quest of flies, and 
always on coming to me they circled round and 
then made a vicious little stoop at my head as if 
threatening to strike. My brown and grey striped 
or mottled tweed caps and hats have often got me 
into trouble with birds, as I have told in a chapter 
in Birds and Man, and it was probably the colour 
of my cap on this occasion that excited the 
animosity of this pair of bats. Again and again 
I waved my stick over my head on seeing one 
approach, but it had not the slightest effect—the 
bat would duck past it and pass over my cap, just 
grazing it boldly as ever. Then I thought of a 
way to frighten them. My cane was a slim pliable 
one, which gave me no support, and was used 
merely to have something in my hand—a thin 
little cane such as soldiers carry in their hands off 
