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PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
An atrocious joke — you are right — an unworthy mystification, 
and infinitely too long kept up, by the aid of which miserable impos- 
tors have odiously exploited credulous humanity, profiting by its 
ignorance to frighten it — to stamp its spirit with the idea of the 
wicked God — to teach the doctrine of eternal punishments. Hap- 
pily all is discovered with the daylight. Had not the bat, which 
obscurant knaves associated with their dark plots, betrayed them, 
some other accomplice would have held a candle for us. 
The Bat is a chimera — a monstrous being — impossible — symbol- 
izing only chimeras — a nocturnal hobgoblin, representing exclu- 
sively the phantoms of sick imaginations — the childbirths of brains 
calcined by asceticism, fasting, and solitary meditations. 
The bat is imposture-made beast, as M. de Talleyrand, bishop 
of Autun, was the lie-made man. 
The character of universal anomaly, of monstrosity, which is ob- 
served in the conformation of the bat ; those whimsical metastases 
of senses which permit the vile beast to hear with the nose, to see 
with the ears, are explained by the subversion of ideas, by the in- 
tellectual disorders which this fantasm is commissioned to sym- 
bolize. 
Another proof that the bat has only represented a false death 
is, that the latter is snub-nosed, while some species of the bat 
have exaggerated noses, which descend even to the breast, after 
the fashion of the elephant’s trunk. 
The bat in other respects ingeniously confesses itself an accom- 
plice in the work of obscurantism ; it has been for sixty ages the 
most devoted abettor of superstition, for the very simple reason 
that its natural sympathies are for the friends of darkness — that 
the light confuses it, and that it cannot see a lighted candle with- 
out experiencing the necessity of blowing it out. 
I cannot impute these sympathies as a crime to the poor beast. 
Birds of a feather flock together. The bat only drags itself along 
during the day; it neither flies nor walks. Such soldiers cannot 
of course be enlisted in the regiment of progress. 
In behalf of the systematic obscurantism of the bat, as well as 
of the bear, who does not any more appear to be a very impetu- 
ous friend of progress, there is one extenuating circumstance of 
