THE FAMILIES AND GENERA OF BATS. 



By Geerit S. Miller, Jr., 

 Assistant Curator, Division of Mammals, U. 8. National Museum. 



INTRODUCTION. 



In 1758, Linnaeus knew seven bats, all of which he placed in Ves- 

 pertilio, the fourth and last genus of the order Primates. The work 

 of the next fifty years, as recorded by Tiedemann in 1808, though 

 it had resulted in the recognition of the order Chiroptera, had not 

 increased the species beyond 14, while the number of genera, even 

 with the addition of the flying lemur, was still only seven. The first 

 subdivision of the' order into families appears to be due to Goldfuss, 

 who, in 1820, arranged the genera in four groups, one of which still 

 comprised the flying lemur. To each group he definitely applied 

 the name " Familie." The real foundation for the current classifi- 

 cation was, however, not laid by Goldfuss, but by Gray, who pub- 

 lished the first of his many papers on bats in 1821. Gray excluded 

 the flying lemur, recognized the two main subdivisions of the order, 

 and applied to the names of families the system of nomenclature now 

 in use. According to this scheme there were two suborders, the Fruc- 

 tivorae and Insectivoras, the former containing the families Pteropidse 

 and Cephalotidse, the latter the Noctilionidse and Vespertilionidse. 

 Though Gray's system was not followed very closely during the suc- 

 ceeding fifty years, it was finally given definite form by Gill in 1872 

 and Dobson in 1875, and since then has been almost universally 

 adopted. The new classification now presented is, in fact, little more 

 than an amplification of that founded by Gray. The increase in our 

 knowledge of .the Chiroptera since 1821 has been, however, very great. 

 * As we have seen, Linnaeus recognized only one genus of bats; Gray 

 placed the number comprised in his four families at about 14. In 

 1865 Peters divided the group into 10 families and subfamilies, con- 

 taining, in all, 59 genera. When Dobson published his Catalogue 

 of the Chiroptera in the British Museum, in 1878, he described 401 

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