Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/180

166 bats catch night-butterflies, the parents of millions of noxious caterpillars, but, in default of a convenient cave, are apt to make their headquarters in smoke-stacks, and thus incur the suspicion of bacon-curing housewives:

is the popular stanza, preluding a shower of whistling brickbats, if the poor cheiropter ventures to leave his den before dark. And yet the bona fide petting of bats would, in many countries, be the best remedy of the mosquito-plague. There are few parts of Eastern Arkansas where the utmost diligence in ditching and draining would abate the torment of the perennial gnat-swarms, and in many swamp-districts of Southern Mexico one might as well try to bar out rats with a rail-fence as gnats with a mosquito-bar, since the forty or fifty different varieties comprise several sizes that could slip through the meshes of a cambric handkerchief, while the largest kind would as easily bite through a flannel night-shirt. Yet in the midst of such a swamp-delta I once passed a comfortable night in the loft of an old cotton-mill. We had neither gauze-bars nor smoke-pots, but two large louvres at opposite ends of the loft stood wide open, and all night the whispering of the land-breeze mingled with the fluttering and the clicking chirp of busy bats, but rarely as much as the incipient buzz of a tipulary insect.

The tenacity of the most preposterous tenets, as compared with that of less irrational delusions, is curiously illustrated by two zoölogical superstitions which North America seems to have imported from the northern nations of the Old World. A hundred years ago nine out of ten American colonists believed firmly in the existence of two remarkable vertebrates: the "joint-snake," a reptile gifted with the faculty of joining and disjoining its organism like a combination pen-holder; and the "glutton," a "monstre able to devore the carcaes of black cattle," as Sir Douglas of Glastonbury informs us.

The latter superstition has been traced to a singular international origin. The Norwegian Fjell-frit, or mountain-whelp, was mistaken for a Viel-frass by the same nation that turned a reindeer into a Rennthier ("race-beast"), and this incorrect "much-eater" was correctly translated into a French glouton and an English glutton, which the Latinizers, with their penchant for "characteristics," specified as a gulo luscus, just as the wolf-fish, or sea-cat of the Scotch fishermen, was made an anarrhichas, from a supposed dexterity in climbing rocks by means of its jagged fins. Encouraged by a solecism thus well indorsed, the first glutton-hunters of our continent reveled in miracle-legends.

"The Western trappers," says Colonel Ruxton ("Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains," page 278), "give most wonderful