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Rh and in other places they had entirely destroyed the cattle introduced by the missionaries. Sir Robert Schomburgk relates that at Wicki, on the river Berbice, no fowls could be kept on account of the ravages of these creatures, which attacked their combs, causing them to appear white from loss of blood. The present writer, when in South and Central America, had many accounts given him as to the attacks of the vampires, and it was agreed upon by most of his informants that these bats when attacking horses showed a decided preference for those of a grey colour. It is interesting to speculate how far the vampire bats may have been instrumental—when they were, perhaps, more abundant—in causing the destruction of the horse, which had disappeared from America previous to the discovery of that Continent.

Although these bats were known thus early to Europeans, the species to which they belonged were not determined for a long time, several of the large frugivorous species having been wrongly set down as blood-suckers, and named accordingly. Thus the name Vampyrus was suggested to Geoffroy and adopted by Spix, who also considered that the long-tongued bats of the group Glossophaga were addicted to blood, and accordingly described Glossophaga soricina as a very cruel blood-sucker (sanguisuga crudelissima), believing that the long brush-tipped tongue was used to increase the flow of blood. Vampyrus spectrum, a large bat inhabiting Brazil, of sufficiently forbidding aspect, which was long considered by naturalists to be thoroughly sanguivorous in its habits, and named accordingly by Geoffroy, has been shown by the observations of travellers to be mainly frugivorous, and is considered by the inhabitants of the countries in which it is found to be perfectly harmless. Charles Waterton believed Artibeus planirostris, a common bat in British Guiana, usually found in the roofs of houses, and now known to be frugivorous, to be the veritable vampire; but neither he nor any of the naturalists that preceded him had succeeded in detecting any bat in the act of drawing blood. It fell to the lot of Charles Darwin to determine one of the blood-sucking species at least, and the following is his account of the circumstances under which the discovery of the sanguivorous habits of Desmodus rufus was made: "The vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is generally not so much owing to the loss of blood as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one was actually caught on a horse's back. We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chile, when my servant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and, fancying he could detect something, suddenly put his hand on the beast's withers, and secured the vampire" (Naturalist's Voyage Round the World, p. 22).

Desmodus rufus, the common blood-sucking bat, is widely spread over the tropical and subtropical parts of Central and South America

. I.—Head of Bloodsucking Vampire (Desmodus rufus).

from Oaxaca to southern Brazil and Chile. It is a comparatively small bat, a little larger than the noctule, the head and body about 3 in. in length, the forearm 2, with a remarkably long and strong thumb; it is destitute of a tail, and has a very peculiar physiognomy (fig. 1). The body is covered with rather short fur of a reddish-brown colour but varying in shade, the extremities of the hairs sometimes ashy. The teeth are peculiar and characteristic, admirably adapted for the (purposes for which they are employed. The upper front there are only two, are enormously enlarged (see fig. 2), and in shape obliquely triangular like small guillotines. The canines, though smaller than the incisors, are large and sharp; but the cheek-teeth, so well developed in other bats, are very small and reduced in number to two above and three below, on each side, with laterally compressed crowns rising but slightly above the level of the gum, their longitudinally disposed cutting edges (in the upper jaw) being continuous with the base of the canine and with each other. The lower front teeth (incisors) are small, bifid, in pairs, and separated from the canines,

teeth (incisors), with a space in front. The lower cheek-teeth are narrow, like those in the upper jaw, but the anterior tooth is slightly larger thanthe others, and separated

. 2.—Teeth of D. rufus. by a small space from the canines. Behind the lower incisors the jaw is deeply hollowed out to receive the extremities of the large upper incisors.

With this peculiar dentition there is associated as remarkable a departure from the general type in the form of the digestive apparatus. The exceedingly narrow oesophagus opens at right angles into a narrow, intestine-like stomach, which almost immediately terminates on the right, without a distinct pylorus, in the duodenum, but on the left forms a greatly elongated caecum, bent and folded upon itself, which appears at first sight like part of the intestines. This, the cardiac extremity of the stomach, is, for a short distance to the left of the entrance of the oesophagus, still very narrow, but soon increases in size, till near its termination it attains a diameter quite three times that of the short pyloric portion. The length of this cardiac diverticulum of the stomach appears to vary from 2 to 6 in., the size in each specimen probably depending on the amount of food obtained by the animal before it was captured.

The only other known species of blood-sucking bat, Diphylla ecaudata, inhabits Brazil, and appears to be much less abundant than Desmodus rufus, from which it is distinguished by its slightly smaller size, by the absence of a groove in the front of the lower lip, the non-development of the inter femoral membrane in the centre, and the presence of a short calcaneum (absent in D. rufus), but more particularly by the presence of an additional rudimentary cheek-tooth (?molar) above and below, and the peculiar form of the lower incisors, which are much expanded in the direction of the jaws and pectinated, forming a semicircular row touching each other, the outer incisors being wider than the inner ones, with six notches, the inner incisors with three each.

Travellers describe the wounds inflicted by the large sharp-edged incisors as being similar to those caused by a razor when shaving: a portion of the skin is shaved off and, a large number of severed capillary vessels being thus exposed, a constant flow of blood is maintained. From this source the blood is drawn through the exceedingly narrow gullet—too narrow for anything solid to pass—into the intestine-like stomach, whence it is, probably, gradually drawn off during the slow progress of digestion, while the animal, sated with food, is hanging in a state of torpidity from the roof of its cave or from the inner sides of a hollow tree.

VAMPYRELLA (L. Cienkowski), a genus of azoosporous (q.v.), parasitic on freshwater algae.

 VAN. (1) The chief town of a vilayet of the same name in Asiatic Turkey; altitude, 5400 ft. Pop. 28,000, of whom 14,000 are Armenians, and the remainder Moslems, mostly of a mixed Kurdish race. It is situated about a mile from the eastern shore of Lake Van, and built along the south side of the citadel rock, an isolated rocky ridge 1300 yds. long, rising 360 ft. out of a plain which extends up to the sharply defined rocky mass of the Varak range, 8 m. distant. On the gently sloping ground cast of the citadel are the Gardens, covering an area of 5 m. by 3, and containing several suburbs and detached houses, along central avenues fringed with trees, and having channels of running water by the sides for irrigation.

The town itself is a poor place with flat-roofed mud houses, narrow winding streets, and surrounded by a ruinous mud wall; but it still contains the business quarter, the government offices and the principal bazaars. In the Gardens are vineyards and orchards of apple, pear, quince, plum and apricot; the houses of the wealthier inhabitants are imposing, built of a wood-framework on a stone foundation and filled in with sun-dried bricks. Many of them are brightly ornamented in the Persian style. Water comes from karez or underground channels and streams from Varak, fed from the Sikhe Lake, an ancient reservoir which preserves the snow waters on the summit of the mountain. For the southern quarter there is the Shemiram Canal, also of very ancient construction, which derives its supply from a large spring 19 m. distant, near Meshingird. There are British, Russian and French consuls who reside in the Gardens. There are a large American Mission with schools, orphanage and a resident doctor, a French (Dominican) Mission with schools, and also a branch of the archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Nestorian Christians who live in the mountains to the south. The climate is generally healthy, extremely cold in winter, with 2 to 3 ft. of snow from December to March, while the summer heat is not excessive. The Persian