FABLES AND SUPERSTITIONS 
produced such an impression of gloom and terror as the 
Oriental bats seem long ago to have done. 
“That the ancient Greek and Roman poets, furnished with exaggerated 
accounts of the animals infesting the remote regions with which their com- 
merce or their conquests had made them acquainted,” remarks Bell, in his 
classic “ History of British Quadrupeds,”’ ® “should have caught eagerly at 
those marvelous stories and descriptions, and rendered them subservient 
to their fabulous but highly imaginative mythology, is not wonderful; and 
it is more than probable that some of the Indian species of bats, with their 
predatory habits, their multitudinous numbers, their obscure and myste- 
rious retreats, and the strange combination of the character of beast and 
bird which they were believed to possess, gave to Virgil the idea, which he 
has so poetically worked out, of the Harpies which fell upon the hastily 
spread tables of the hero and his companions, and polluted, whilst they 
devoured, the feast from which they had driven the affrighted guests. But 
that the little harmless bats of our own climate, whose habits are at once so 
innocent and so amusing, and whose time of appearance and activity is 
that when everything around would lead the mind to tranquillity and peace, 
should be forced into mystery and horror, as an almost essential feature 
in the picture, is an anomaly which cannot be easily explained.” 
At any rate, while the graceful pinions of a bird have been 
given to their angels of light, the leathery and angular wings 
of the bat have always been used by painters and sculptors to 
signalize the forms of fiends from pits of darkness. This is 
simply the old primal contrast of light and darkness, day and 
night, for which the nocturnal and elusive bat has furnished a 
ready symbol. 
LyRE BAT (MEGADERMA). 
67 
