VO!,. XXXVIII. No. 21. i 
WHOLE No. 1530. 1 
NEW YORK CITY, MAY 24, 1879. 
iFRli'E FIVE CENTS. 
[ 82.00 PER YEAR. 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by the Rural Publishing Company, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.! 
ing. The organ of smell in many insect- 
tiverous bats is exceedingly acute. In these 
the nose is provided with folds of the in¬ 
tegument of great size and most grotesque 
forms, rendering their physiognomy like that 
which would be produced by a uose turned 
inside out and complicated by a hare-lip. 
Bats have such an extraordinary develop¬ 
ment of the Bense of touch, that Spallanzani 
was led to believe that they had a sixth sense. 
In his experiments he extracted the eyes of 
some of the creatures, stopped up their ears 
and noses completely, then confined them in 
a room across which numerous strings were 
drawn in various directions, and yet they all 
dew abont among the entanglement of obstacles 
without ever coining in contact with any. 
Cuvier discovered that this exquisite sense of 
touch lies in the flying membrane and that the 
bat is made acquainted with the distance of 
bodies by the different modifications impressed 
upon this membrane by the impulse of the air. 
Bats vary in size from pigmies no larger than 
bee to monsters nine inches long with a 
spread of wings fully five feet. Probably the 
most famous of the race is the large South 
American species, the Vampire, about whose 
deadly blood-sucking propensities so many ex¬ 
aggerated “ travelers’ yarns ” have been told. 
Its natural food is insects, but when pressed by 
hunger, it will suck the blood of poultry, cattle 
and even man. The blood is obtained by suc¬ 
tion from the capillary vessels, and not by any 
wound made by the teeth. The subject of the 
accompanying engraving is the Roussette or 
Flying Fox, one of the species of the genus 
pteropus, an inhabitant of the East Indies where 
it is largely used as food. A full-grown speci¬ 
men is about eight inches long with a spread 
of wings of about four feet. According to the 
fashion usual among the bat family, it is snug¬ 
ly resting, head-downwards, clinging to a sup¬ 
port by.the sharp claws terminating its hind 
legs. If disturbed while in this position, it 
is excellently situated for immediate flight, as 
all it has to do is to loosen its hold and it is at 
once launched into the air. The recesses of a 
cave or a ruin are their favorite retreats. 
THE FLYING FOX OR ROUSETTE BAT 
NOTES FROM THE RURAL FARM 
We are planting corn (May 14). That for 
home use is upon a five-acre field—from which 
a large average of hay has been taken for 
three years past. This is one of those fields of 
which there are several npon this old farm— 
which, let the season be what it may, will pro¬ 
duce at least a fair average yield, and in some 
seasons an immense one. Thus, should the 
summer prove wet, we shall harvest not less 
than 40 bushels ; should it prove dry, not less 
than 60 bushels—perhaps a good deal more. 
Our land here is decidedly of three sorts. The 
first (upland) is a sandy-gravelly loam; the 
second, (midland), a mucky loam, and the 
third (lowland) is pure muck, yielding from 
two to three tons per acre of a fine quality of 
salt-meadow hay. The five-acre field of which 
we began to write, was plowed and harrowed. 
Then 1,800 pounds of superphos" 
phate of lime were sown and 
harrowed in. Theu the field was 
rolled with a heavy roller and 
the corn planted, four kernels 
- to a hill, the hills four feet apart. 
Our readers will remember the 
request we made last year that 
they would send ns ears of the 
corn which they had raised with 
S. the best success. So many were 
the responses of our good friends 
that the collection at length be- 
came one both curious and in- 
6tructivc, exceeding in variety 
any display we have ever seen 
^ - - — - at our best agricultural fairs. 
-• ' The best of those ears were sent 
R here and these we have used as 
seed for the above corn-field. 
Of course, these many varieties 
will intermix immeasurably, and 
although we look to the result 
as one that will gratify our eu- 
grTi r. riosity more than it promises to 
~ impart any useful lesson, yet, 
p— ' if it should turn out otherwise, 
it would not prove the first time 
that instruction was gleaned 
when least expected. In a 
measured quarter-acre plot of 
Tzn. the midland belt we have plant- 
r~ ed our 
~. - - Blunt's White Prolific. 
_ , Having been mowing ground 
for the past two years, 6 loads 
of coarse barnyard manure 
were spread over the sod and 
~ plowed under. Theu it was 
harrowed each way and rolled 
|g|^|§|[!gp alternately three times. The 
area of tills plot is 132x82£ feet, 
-rpppPV- and a kernel of corn was planted 
every 14 inches in the row—the 
p^pgggg||& rows four feet apart. We used 
v - ' ~ what might be ealled a com- 
pound dibble to insure uniform- 
ity of depth and distance. This 
HfiSBBjgr cousisted of a strip of wood two 
inches wide 74 inches long upon 
which five wedge-shaped pieces 
=. were securely nailed, the points 
r of which were precisely 14 inches 
_ _ apart. By a pressure of the 
foot upon either end of ihe con- 
trivanee while held vertically, 
the pickets were forced into the 
ground up to the cross-strip, 
5^ making five holes two-aud-a-half 
inches deep. Thus the entire 
plot was gone over. Into each 
of these holes a single kernel 
was dropped and covered over 
rather compactly to a level with 
the surrounding soil, so that 
The different genera of bats constitute the 
order of Cheiroptera or wing-banded animals, 
a term compounded of two Greek words mean¬ 
ing hand and wing. Common as they are all 
the world over, no kind of animated beings 
have been such a puzzle to zoologists as these 
strange, weird, grotesque creatures. Aristotle 
Pliny and other ancient naturalists held them 
to be birds, an opinion religiously followed by 
most people during the Ages of Faith atid even 
now entertained by many persons. But just 
as there are always some opponents of every 
established belief, so from time to time there 
have arisen sceptics who refused to accept this 
classification, having a very natural preference 
for one of their own invention. Some of these 
were as quaint as the animals to which they 
related, such as that which placed the bat and 
the ostrich in the same order 
because one could fly and the 
other couldn’t. 
As with hundreds of other 
enigmas of by-gone ages, it was 
left to modern investigators, by — 
careful auotomical research, to 
discover that the true position 
of the bat tribe in the scale of 
nature is that of roatumiferous 
quadrupeds. In the order there 
are many genera, some re¬ 
stricted to certain circumscribed 
localities, others of continental 
diffusion, and still others to be 
met with in all parts of the 
world except the arctic regions. 
The most remarkable feature of 
the whole of them is the wide 
and delicate membrane, thin and rrrr 
seiui - transparent, that serves 
the purpose of wiugs and ren- 
ders them the connecting link — 
between Birds and Mammals. 
This eousiats of an expansion y 
of the skiu of the flanks and 
other portions of the body. In 
structure it is double, so that Ti_ 
with ordinary care, the upper 
and lower surfaces can be sep- 
eraied from each other. The —f 
conformation of the entire body 7ZT 
is subsidiary to the efficiency of 
the wings thus formed. Very 
active iu the air, a bat is always r 
awkward and helpless ou the 
grouud. When it attempts to 
walk, the wings are shut and 
become fore-feet, the hook ter- ■ r ~—~ 
min a ting one thumb is fixed to —- 
some object ahead, and by it :jj||=jgSg§jgl 
the body is pulled forward and ' • ’ - ■ *• 
to one side, the next step being V— 
taken by a similar movement by fgjSiajf j Bil 
means of the hook on the other 
thumb. The length of the 
wings renders it difficult and glSSgjSgfgi: 
disagreeable for the animal to 
ri&e from a flat surface, and as ~ * 
a rule it seeks some slight eleva- - r-~~ -:T 
tion before beginning flight. 
The diminative size of the __ 
eyes of bats is familiarly ex- 
pressed in the common saying — 
“as blind aB a bat.” This char- ^ 
acteristie belongs to the active, ^ 
large-eared insectiverous group j 
whose minute eyes are placed 7^ 
almost within the auricle and 
a 
concealed by the hair; but iu 
the fruit-eating geuera the eye 
is of the usual size as is also the 
ear. The diminative eye is com¬ 
pensated for by the great de¬ 
velopment of the sense of bear- 
THE FRYING FOX OR ROUSETTE BAT 
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