1844.] Notices of various Mammalia. 479 



Dysopes). The Society has received Pt. medius (vel Edwardsii> Desm., 

 apud Ogilby and others, though Edwards's specimen was from the 

 Mauritius, and should therefore, I suspect, be the Pt. edulis,*) from 

 Arracan, Tipperah, and Assam, where I cannot help considering the 

 Pt. assamensis described by Messrs. McClelland and Horsfield to 

 present merely an individual variation, The same appears to be Dr. 

 Walker's opinion, as Pt. Edwardsii alone is included in his list of 

 Assamese mammalia. Mr. Hodgson has also sent it from Nepal as his 

 Pt. leucocephalus («/. A. S. IV, 7^0), together with the Cynopterus 

 marginatus as his Pt. pyrivorus (ibid.), which latter has likewise been 

 received by the Society from Assam and Arracan, and both of these 

 species appear to be common throughout India ; the former also doubt- 

 less constituting the large " Flying Fox" so abundant in the Maldives 

 and Laccadives. The third Indian species of frugivorous Bat, Pt. 

 Dussumieri, (of which a description will be found in XII, 176,) is still 

 wanting to the Society's collection. 



Of Cynopterus marginatus, I have been keeping three live females 

 for several weeks. They are exclusively frugivorous, and take no 

 notice of the buzz of an insect held to them ; which I remark in re- 

 ference to a statement of Mr. Gray, that the nearly allied little 

 Kiodote is partly insectivorous: this I doubt very much. The 

 Cynopterus is a very ravenous eater, and will devour more than its 

 own weight at a meal, voiding its food but little changed as excrement, 

 while still slowly munching away. Of guava it swallows the juice only 

 (though a soft mellow fruit), opening and closing its jaws very leisure- 

 ly in the act of mastication, and rejecting the residue. The flight of 

 this Bat is particularly light and buoyant, far different from the 

 measured rowing, the direct and heavy flight of the large Pteropus ; 

 but the general manners and the voice of the two are very similar.t 



The other Indian Vesper tilionidce fall into three principal groups ; viz 



* The Mauritius species is styled Pt. vulgaris, v. rubricollis, Geoff., in P. Z. S. 

 1831, p. 45. 



f After a while, the three caged females mentioned above attracted a male, who 

 used to be continually hovering about their cage of an evening, and at length took up 

 his diurnal residence hitching to a rafter above a dark staircase close by, where one 

 of the females who escaped immediately joined him, and they continued to retreat there 

 regularly for some days, when both were caught. 



