174 NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY: 
Tue Wine or Bars.—In Max Schultze’s “ Archiv,” Band vii., 
1"* Heft, is a most exhaustive and interesting paper on the struct- 
ure of the bats wing, by Dr. Joseph Schébl, of Prague. Long 
ago Spallanzani discovered that bats which had their eyes put 
out were able, nevertheless, when allowed to fly about in a room, 
to avoid threads stretched across it. This faculty he attributed to 
some highly developed sense of touch possessed by the wing. Dr. 
Schobl has ‘repeated these experiments ; but for the putting out 
of the eyes he has substituted the less painful method of covering 
them with sticking plaster. He has kept bats, thus treated, for a 
year alive in his room, and has entirely confirmed Spallanzani’s 
results. To account for these phenomena, the wings of bats have 
been examined for peculiar nerve-endings, by Cuvier, Leydig, and 
Krause, but without any success. The author’s discoveries are 
therefore quite new to science. The following is a short abstract 
of his results. The bat’s wing membrane consists of two sheets 
of skin, the upper derived from that of the back, the lower from 
that of the belly. The epidermic and Malpighian layers in each 
sheet remain separate, whilst the true skin is inseparably fused. 
In this fused medium layer are imbedded the muscles, nerves, ves- 
sels, etc., of the wing. A complicated arrangement of delicate 
muscles is described, which have their tendons formed of elastic 
tissue instead of the usual white fibrous tissue. There are also 
present numerous long elastic bundles stretched in different direc- 
tions in different regions of the wing. The arteries are each ac- 
companied by a single vein and a nerve, the three keeping company 
as far as the commencement of the capillary system. With regard 
to the pulsation in the wing, Dr. Schébl has nothing new to add to — 
the observations of Wharton Jones and Leydig. The whole wing 
is covered, both on the upper and under surface, with extremely 
fine, sparsely scattered hairs. These hairs are most numerous on the 
inner third of the hinder part of the wing, and they gradually de 
crease in number towards the tip. The two wings, taken together, 
contain from eight thousand to ten thousand of them. They 
have a general resemblance to those on the body, but are simpler 
in form. Their length is about 0.2500" in Vesperugo serotinus, 
the species principally made use of in these investigations. Each 
hair sac has from two to seven sebaceous glands, according to the 
species, and one sweat gland opening into its sac. The two outer 
fibrous layers of the hair sac have no sharp line of demarcation 
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