BATS. 11 



interesting little animals, which have not only furnished 

 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 imaginative mythology, is not won- 

 derful ; and it is more than probable that some of the 

 Indian species of Bats, with their predatory habits, their 

 multitudinous numbers, their obscure and mysterious 

 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 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. 



The views entertained, even by the most celebrated 

 naturalists of antiquity, respecting the nature of these 

 animals, were extremely vague. Aristotle himself, whose 

 genius seems to have discovered, by an almost intuitive 

 perception, the relations of natural objects, and the com- 

 parative value of external forms and structural charac- 

 ters, speaks of them as having feet as birds, but wanting 



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