AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 
289 
NOTES OF A NATURALIST. 
By Jacob Green, M. D., &c. 
I have passed a portion of the summer and autumn of 
the last few years in the western part of Pennsylvania, in 
a little village almost surrounded with lofty hills. Along 
the base of one of the hills, a fine stream of water winds 
its way to the mighty Ohio, which river it joins a few 
miles from the city of Pittsburg. The great post-road 
from Philadelphia to Wheeling passes through this village; 
but it is quite remote from any thickly inhabited town. 
Much of the surrounding country is as rude and unculti- 
vated as when the red man of the forest was lord of the 
soil. In such a spot as this, where hills, and dales, and 
woods, and streams, are almost all fresh from the hand of 
the Bestower, the lover of nature will be sure to find much 
that is new to amuse and interest him. My present ob- 
ject is to record a few scattered observations made during 
some leisure hours when exploring this extensive and al- 
most untrodden field of teeming nature. 
The Bat. 
“ Lucemque perosi, 
Nocte volant, seroque trahant a vespere nomen.” 
Ovid. Metam. 
There is scarcely any quadruped to which most persons 
have a greater aversion than the Bat. The ancient poets 
derived their terrible fictions of the Harpies from some 
winged monster of this genus. Many of our antipathies 
cannot easily be explained; but our aversion from the Bat 
may be traced to several causes. With some, it may in 
part arise from the fact that it is one of the unclean animals 
enumerated in the Pentateuch; or, perhaps, from the cir- 
cumstance that it inhabits gloomy caverns and deserted 
ruins. The principal reason is, no doubt, the general be- 
lief that it is a noxious creature. In some cases where 
the Bat has flown into a room during the evening, I have 
heard of its getting entangled in the hair of the head, and 
thus occasioning serious bites. Though it is considered by 
most naturalists as a fabulous story, it is next to certain, 
that some of the species suck the blood of man and other 
animals during sleep. I am informed by my friend 
Titian R. Peale, Esq., that several undoubted instances of 
this kind fell under his own observation during a late visit 
to South America. One was that of an individual who 
slept on a hammock within a few feet of his own. He 
examined the bleeding wounds of the person bitten, and 
now entertains no doubt on the subject, though he often 
slept with his feet uncovered, without being so fortu- 
nate as to receive an attack. The indefatigable natural- 
ist, Mr. Waterton, who was for several months in Dutch 
and Portuguese Guiana, where the vampyre abounds, is 
fully convinced that they have this power, though he also 
in vain threw himself into the most favourable situations 
for the animal to exercise its sanguineous propensities upon 
himself. “ The provoking brute,” he remarks, “ would 
refuse to give my claret a solitary trial, though he would 
tap the more favoured Indian’s toe, in a hammock within 
a few yards of mine. For the space of eleven months I 
slept alone in the loft of a woodcutter’s abandoned house 
in the forest, and though the vampyre came in and out 
every night, and I had the finest opportunity of seeing 
him, as the moon shone through apertures where windows 
had once been, I never could be certain that I saw him 
make a positive attempt to quench his thirst from my 
veins, though he often hovered over the hammock.” See 
Loudon’s Mag., Sept., 1832 . The great mystery in this 
whole process is how the Bat punctures the blood-vessels 
so as not to wake the sufferers. As far as my observation 
extends, none of the Bats which inhabit our northern 
states, have the propensity to suck the blood of living ani- 
mals. I have long been in the habit of observing this 
wonderful quadruped, and some of my remarks on this 
subject will be found published by the late Dr. John D. 
Godman, in his American Natural History. The Rev. 
G. White, in his Selborne, gives a curious account of a 
tame Bat “that would take flies out of a person’s hand;” 
but although I have made frequent attempts to domesti- 
cate these birds of night, they all entirely failed; none of 
the animals lived more than two or three weeks after their 
imprisonment. 
From the equivocal character of the Bat, forming as it 
does so striking a link in the chain of organized beings be- 
tween quadrupeds and birds, it might be supposed that 
the family to which it belongs was well understood by 
naturalists, yet perhaps there is no one which is more con- 
fused. Most of the genera are founded on the number and 
position of the cutting teeth, characters which have been 
fully ascertained to vary with the age of the animal. Pro- 
fessor Rafinesque has proposed a genus which he callsNycti- 
ceus, which includesthoseBatswith two incisorsin theupper 
jaw near the canines, widely separated in front by an interven- 
ing space. In this genus I placed the Bat which I shall present- 
ly describe; but Mr. Gray, in his “ Natural Arrangement 
of the Genera of Bats,” (Philosophical Magazine, vol. 6, 
N. S.,) observes, thatthis genus dependson the “deciduous 
nature of the teeth.” The Baron Cuvier, though he men- 
tions Nycticeus with some favour, still he does not adopt 
it; I have myself, however, but little doubt that the dis- 
tinctions noticed by Professor R. will be found permanent. 
