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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
hog, and the shrew mouse belonging to a group of beasts with 
which the bats show no inconsiderable affinity. 
I have spoken of the opinion that the bat is a kind of bird. 
This view seems to have been entertained by the Jews, and the 
w bird of darkness” is placed in Deut. xiv., v. 18 amongst the 
unclean ones forbidden as food : — 
u And the stork and the heron after her kind, and the lap- 
wing and the bat.” 
Aristotle, though he placed the bats amongst flying animals, 
and therefore amongst birds, distinctly recognised the differences 
in their organisation, and the same thing may be affirmed of 
Pliny. But in spite of this, and although Albertus Magnus, in 
the Middle Ages, was fully acquainted with the true nature of 
bats, as beasts, as well as with their winter torpidity, we find 
later on a retrogression of opinion. 
Thus Belon, in 1557, in his Histoire de la Nature des 
Oyseaux , includes bats with his birds. At the same time, he 
was not unacquainted with the mode of their reproduction, as 
the following verse proves : — 
La souris chauve est un oiseau de nuict 
Qui point no pond ; ains ses petits enfante, 
Lesquels du laict de ses tetins sustante, 
En petit corps grande vertu reluit. 
Yet later — by nearly a century — in 1645, Aldrovandus 
decided that bats were rather birds than beasts, and this in 
spite of his carefiil study of them, as proved by his beginning 
to distinguish tbeir different kinds one from another. 
Some twenty-five years later, Kay gave them their true posi- 
tion amongst quadrupeds — a position which they have ever 
since retained. 
The Teutonic mind seems early to have appreciated the true 
nature of bats, as we may judge from the German name, 
Fledermaus , and the old English term, flittermouse. 
Let us look a little closely at our subject of to-day — the 
bat. 
In the first place, there is a little rounded body, covered with 
soft fur, which is indeed, wmat Shakspeare calls it, “ wool,” 
when giving the ingredients of the cauldron of Macbeth’s 
witches. 
There is a small head, little eyes, large ears, a tail, and two 
pairs of limbs of very unequal size. The hind pair (the 
legs) are of moderate length and singularly disposed, so that 
the knees are turned almost backwards, like our elbows. 
Each leg terminates in a foot, furnished with five toes, each 
with a long, curved claw, all of about the same length. These 
toes are not w 7 ebbed, like those of a duck, but are free. 
