BATS 49 
developments and excrescences on the face which 
give to some species a more grotesque countenance 
than was ever imagined by any medieval artist in 
stone—these are doubtless all sense-organs, and the 
question is, are these all additions to the one sense 
we know of—an extension and refinement of the 
sense of touch? I think they are more than that, 
and there are a few facts that incline one to believe 
that knowledge comes to the bat through more 
ports than one—knowledge of things far as well 
as near. One observation made by Millais points 
to this conclusion. He noticed that a crowd of 
noctule bats that sheltered in a hollow tree by day, 
on issuing in the evening all took flight in the same 
direction, and that the line of flight was not the 
same, but varied from day to day; that on follow- 
ing them up to the feeding area he discovered that 
insects were always most abundant at that spot on 
that evening. It came to this—that on issuing 
from the hollow tree every bat in the crowd, 
issuing one or two at a time and flying straight 
away, knew where to go, south, east, west or 
north, to some spot a mile or two away. The bat 
too, then, like the far-seeing vulture, is “ sagacious 
of his quarry from afar,’ but what Nature has 
given him in place of his dim, degenerate eyes to 
make him sagacious in this way remains to be 
found out. 
