Quadrupeds. 2007 



Spanish Town, who thus replied : ' I know Mr. Dickon, to whom your newspaper pa- 

 ragraph relates. He details his experience in the parish of Westmoreland [the same 

 part of Jamaica as that in which my own observations were made — P. H. G.] ; I will 

 however endeavour to ascertain the precise locality in which he had discovered his ex- 

 traordinary colony of bats. The Council of the Royal Agricultural Society of Jamaica, 

 of which T am a member, had had its attention called to the manure to be obtained 

 from faecal deposits in caves frequented by bats, and they had analyzed the material, 

 but found it so largely charged with the comminuted wing-cases of insects, and so lit- 

 tle acted upon by decomposition, that the azotized ingredients combined but slowly as 

 a fertilizer. Several similar accounts were given to us of cave-deposits, to that fur- 

 nished by Mr. Dickon. His discoveiy, however, being made in an unopened cavern, 

 into which the bats had penetrated through crevices in the rock, has special recom- 

 mendations to notice. 



" ' My attention was some time ago drawn to a similar harbouring-place of our 

 Cheiroptera. One evening, as I was crossing the marshes between Spanish Town and 

 Kingston, by the high-road, I was surprised at sundown at the sudden rushing out of 

 a stream of bats from the face of a cliffy hill that rises precipitously from the swamp. 

 They continued pouring out for some quarter of an hour or twenty minutes ; they 

 stretched like a string for some hundred yards, in consequence of the one-by-one file 

 in which they came forth from the crevice, and then dispersed themselves up and down 

 and all about, covering the whole expanse of the contiguous marsh. The long high- 

 way perspective across the swamp ; the level bed of rushes bending in wavelets to the 

 evening wind ; the distant mountains with beetling summits and broken declivities, 

 lighted in angular patches by the setting sun, exhibited a wide, dilated and diversified 

 scene, in which no object rose to interrupt the line made by the flitting swarms as they 

 streamed out from the face of the cliff, and spread their myriad numbers over the 

 plain. I have myself noticed the great depth of the rejectamenta of bats in these 

 caverned recesses, but a great deal of it consisted of undecayed down, as well as faecal 

 mutings, and undevoured fragments of insects.' 



" In a subsequent communication my friend favoured me with a sample of the excre- 

 mental deposits from a bat-cavern on Swansea estate, in the Vale of Luidas ; and I 

 forward it, with this paper, to the Zoological Society. 



" I close this article with a few particulars of description, some of which are better 

 observed on the living animal than on specimens dried or in spirit. A male measured 

 as follows: — Muzzle to insertion of tail, 4^ inches; expanse of volar membranes, 

 24f ; ear, from posterior base of tragus to tip, 1^ ; ditto, from anterior base to tip, 1 ; 

 tragus, longest side, f g ; shortest, | s ; nose to front angle of eye, T 5 5 ; nose to front of 

 tragus, §. Colour varying ; upper parts yellow-brown, more or less bright ; a well- 

 defined narrow line of pale fulvous ruus medially down the back from the head to the 

 tail ; under parts pale fawn, bright fulvous or orange ; face purplish ; the muzzle and 

 chin are much corrugated ; face warty ; the ears fall into elegant curves. The volar 

 membranes are delicately thin, transparent and glossy ; studded with minute, white, 

 papillary glands, which for the most part follow the course of the blood-vessels, but are 

 largest and most numerous in the vicinity of the trunk. The membranes being at- 

 tached along each side of the spine, with an interval in the middle of the back of but 

 ^ths of an inch, the body is, to a great extent, free. The wing, when at rest, has but 

 a single fold, the ultimate joint of the second and third fingers being brought back 

 upon the penultimate. The reproductive organs are large and prominent. At the 



