Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/557

 and against each other, pretending to bite, but never harming their companions of the same species; though I have seen them exhibit a sad spirit of persecution to an unfortunate Barbastelle which was placed in the same cage with them. They may be readily brought to eat from the hand, and my friend Mr. James Sowerby had one which, when at liberty in the parlor, would fly to the hand of any of the young people who held up a fly toward it, and, pitching on the hand, take the fly without hesitation. If the insect were held between the lips, the bat would then settle on its young patron's cheek, and take the fly with great gentleness from the mouth; and so far was this familiarity carried that, when either of my young friends made a humming noise with the mouth in imitation of an insect, the bat would search about the lips for the promised dainty."

One of the "young friends" here referred to is now the esteemed secretary at the Botanical Gardens, and he has assured me of the truth of the anecdote.

The cry of the bat is exceedingly shrill, so much so that some persons' ears are quite unable to detect it.

Homer compares the voices of the ghosts to the cries of bats. In the twenty-fourth book of the "Odyssey," 6, he says: "As when bats in a corner of a great cave, when one of them has fallen from off the cluster—so they (the ghosts) went along screaming."

Or, as Pope gives it:

Bats bring forth but one or two young ones at a birth—when they are received into the interfemoral membrane as into a cradle—the mother then hanging suspended not by her feet but by her thumbs.

The young are born naked and blind, and are suckled at the breast much as is the human infant.

There are many kinds of bats, though their number is uncertain.

There are some fourteen species even in England, and at least three hundred and twenty, arranged in some seventy-nine genera, in the world at large.

One of our English bats, already referred to as "the long-eared bat," does indeed merit its name, since it has relatively the largest ears found in the whole animal kingdom, being about equal to the length of its entire body. They are capable of being folded up, and generally are so folded, during sleep.

Another kind of bat found in England is called the leaf-nosed bat, because in it not the ear but the nose is the seat of extraordinary skin-development—productions of skin curiously folded surrounding and surmounting the external nostrils.