40 INTRODUCTION 



It is perhaps difficult to account for the prejudices which 

 have always existed against these harmless and interesting little 

 animals, which are not only objects of superstitious dread to the 

 ignorant, but have proved to the poet and the painter a fertile 

 source of images of gloom and terror. That the ancient Greek 

 and Roman poets, furnished with exaggerated accounts of the 

 animals infesting the remote regions with which their commerce 

 or their conquests had made them acquainted, should have 

 caught eagerly at those marvellous stories and descriptions, and 

 rendered them subservient to their fabulous but highly imagina- 

 tive mythology, is not wonderful. It is, indeed, more than 

 probable that some of the Indian species of bats, with their pre- 

 datory habits, their multitudinous numbers, their obscure and 

 mysterious retreats, and the strange combination of the char- 

 acter 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 his 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 

 scenes of mystery and horror, as an almost essential feature in 

 the picture, is an anomaly which cannot be so easily explained. 



They have, however, been connected with various evil deeds 

 as foreign to their natures as sky from earth, with blood- 

 sucking,^ with maliciously entangling themselves in women's 

 hair, with thefts of meat and bacon, and with mysterious 

 entombments in impossible places.^ The "wool of bat" was 

 included by the witches of " Macbeth " amongst the in- 

 gredients used in preparing a charm,* and Tennyson's "black 

 bat night " was surely not used in a complimentary sense. 



Sense organs: — No orle who sees a bat on the wing in 

 pursuit of its ordinary vocation can doubt that these animals 



' Article on Horseshoes, infra. 



"' Zoologist, 1897,46 ; T. P. Bartlett, /o«r«. cit., 1844, 613 ; A. C. Smith, ytf«r«.«/., 

 1854, 4245. 



^ Act iv., sc. I. 



