WHAT ARE BATS? 
233 
The cry of the bat is exceedingly shrill, so much so that some 
persons’ ears are quite unable to detect it. 
Homer compares the voices of the ghosts to the cries of bats. 
In the 24th book of the Odyssey, 6, he says : 66 As when bats in 
a corner of a great cave, when one of them has fallen from off 
the cluster — so they (the ghosts) went along screaming.” 
Or, as Pope gives it : — 
Trembling the spectres glide, and plaintive vent 
Their hollow screams along the deep descent, 
As in the cavern of some rifted dep, 
Where flock nocturnal bats, and birds obscene ; 
Clustered they hang, till at some sudden shock 
They move, and murmurs run through all the rock. 
So cowering fled the sable heap of ghosts. 
Bats bring forth but one or two young ones at a birth — 
when they are received into the interfemoral membrane as inbo 
a cradle — the mother then hanging suspended not by her feet 
but by her thumbs. 
The young are born naked and blind, and are suckled at the 
breast much as is the human infant. 
There are many kinds of bats, though their number is 
uncertain. 
There are some 14 species even in England, and at least 320, 
arranged in some 79 genera, in the world at large. 
One of our English bats, already referred to as “ the long- 
eared bat,” does indeed merit its name, since it has relatively 
the largest ears found in the whole animal kingdom, being 
about equal to the length of its entire body. They are capable 
of being folded up, and generally are so folded, during sleep. 
Another kind of bat found in England is called the leaf-nosed 
bat, because in it not the ear but the nose is the seat of ex- 
traordinary skin development — productions of skin curiously 
folded surrounding and surmounting the external nostrils. 
The use of this membrane, according to 
Dr. Dobson, is to serve as a tactile organ 
(like the wings); and this is the more 
probable, seeing that that family of leaf- 
nosed bats which is represented in England 
have the smallest eyes, and are devoid of 
a tragus or inner part of the seemingly 
double ear before spoken of. 
Bats are divisible into two great groups. 
One of them includes all the insect-eating bats (with or without 
nose-leaves), more or less like the bats which inhabit this 
country. They have almost always teeth such as those already 
described, often a very large tragus to the ear, and a stomach 
Nose-leaf of the Bat 
