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VERTEBRATA. 
LONG-EARED BAT — SIZE OF LIFE. 
RHTNOLOPHUS NOBILIS — SIZE OF LIFE. 
of which they move easily on the ground, terminate in 
strong claws, which they use in clinging to the crevices 
of walls, rocks, and buildings: the thumbs are each 
furnished with a hook, which also answers the pur- 
pose of support in the hidden places they select for 
their abodes. In one large division of the family 
there is a curious leaf-like appendage on the nose, 
variously developed in the different species, whence 
they are called Leaf-nosed Bats. Some have the ears 
enormously expanded, and some have a prehensile 
power in the tail. 
Though the bats are, upon the whole, useful rather 
than hurtful to man, they are creatures to which po- 
etry and superstition have in all ages had recourse to 
deepen the feelings of loathing and horror. They are 
not only of strange forms, but they are things of the 
doubtful light — the dim twilight— which in ages of 
ignorance converts white stones into ghosts and bushes 
into specters. They dwell in the ruined wall, or riven 
earth, or gloomy cavern : in Eastern counti'ies they 
often find their way into the sepulchres and catacombs 
of the ancients. They have been observed, therefore, 
as dwellers with desolation and death ; and it was 
stretching the imagination but a little further to sup- 
pose that they were in league with these loathed and 
dreaded powers. 
The rapacity of the larger bats, such as are found 
in the warm countries, feeding during the twilight 
gloom, gave color to these suppositions. Hovering 
about the Pagan temples, they ate greedily the blood 
and other remains of the sacrifices. When famine or 
pestilence, which were then of frequent occurrence, 
strewed the earth with the bodies of the dead, or when 
night closed upon the horrors of the battle-field, the 
bats thronged to the nocturnal feast. As in all cases 
they came dim and apparently formless, with wing 
most unlike any organ bearing the same name which 
is spread to the light of day, they perfected their claim 
of poetical alliance with the infernal regions, and the 
powers which hold dominion over them. Hence, as 
the peacock was the bird sacred to Juno, the queen of 
Heaven, so the bat became the creature sacred, or ac- 
cursed, as it may be, to Proserpine, the empress 
of Hell 
The use of bats for these purposes is as old 
as Homer, who very skillfully manages them in 
heightening the graphic effect of the splendid 
passage in which he describes the shrieks and 
wailings of the ghosts in the regions of woe ; 
and after Homer, all poets and painters who have 
ventured upon similar delineations have made 
use of the bats for the purposes of effect. Even to this day, painters must borrow the wings of 
bats for their devils, in the same way that they borrow the wings of doves for their angels ; and 
HEAD OF MEGADERM — SIZE OF LIFE. 
SKELETON OF BAT. 
