Many accounts are given in American writers of the thousands of bats collected in the caverns which abound in the Western States, while in the Egyptian catacombs they hang in myriads. For of all things a bat dreads the light when beasts of prey are abroad, and next to that he fears any position near the ground where weasels, wild cats, or other flesh-eating animals may seize him in his sleep. Nay, the smaller bats live in constant fear of the larger ones, for they feed upon one another with evident relish.

Yet in spite of dangers the bat family, aided by its power of flight, has spread all over the world, from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, east, west, north, and south. In cold countries they hang by their feet in the winter, or sometimes by their clawed thumbs, and sleep in dark recesses, scarcely breathing till the warm weather and the insects return; but in warm countries they are active all the year, sleeping by day and feeding by night.

In England and North America they are content chiefly with insect food, but in South America the Vampires, among the leaf-nosed bats, fasten on to large animals and suck their blood. Mr. Darwin had his servant’s horse bitten and disabled for two days by a vampire in Chili; while Mr. Wallace, when on the Amazon River, was himself twice bitten, once upon the great toe, and once on the tip of his nose while asleep! A bat is a grotesque-looking animal at best; but some of these leaf-nosed bats are simply hideous, with their wide-open mouth, sharp teeth, and the skinny leaves sticking up round their nose.

How different are the gentle-looking fruit-eating bats of the Tropics, which seem to belong to quite a different branch of the family. Their fox-like and intelligent faces are a pleasure to look at, reminding one of the lemurs, and harmonising beautifully with their quiet peaceful life among the fig-trees, guavas, mango-trees, and plantains of the East. There they hang in dense masses from the tall silk-cotton trees till night comes on, and then take wing as soon as the sun is set, and hooking themselves by one thumb to the fruit-trees, hold the fruit in the other as they feed.

Fig. 63.

Fruit-bats[150] hanging from the ledges of a cave in the Mauritius.

Thus we have a wide range of habits in bats, from the insect-eaters to the blood-sucking vampires on one hand, and the gentle fruit-bats on the other.

But one virtue the most bloodthirsty and the most gentle have in common, and that is maternal love. As soon as the little ones are born they

Footnote 150. Pteropus vulgaris.

cling to their mother’s breast, and she often folds over them the skin which covers her tail, so as to form a kind of pouch, so that wherever she flies they go with her, and are carefully tended and suckled by her till they can take up the chase for themselves.

And now we have followed out the Rodents and Insectivora in their various lines. Both lowly groups, of simple structure and with comparatively feeble brains, they have chiefly escaped destruction from higher forms by means of their nocturnal and burrowing habits or arboreal lives, and the marvellous rapidity with which they breed, combined with their power of sleeping without food during the winter in all cold countries. Nevertheless, though they are often strangely alike in outward form, they differ in many remarkable respects. The insect-eaters now existing are chiefly a few straggling forms of a once widely-spread group; while the rodents, on the contrary, are still a very numerous and varied family, spread all over the earth, and boasting of such intelligent forms as the squirrel, the beaver, and the rat. But here their advantages appear to end, while the insectivora point onwards not only to the bats, the only flying milk-givers, but also through the colugo to the lemurs, and thus onwards to the monkeys. It may be, and indeed probably is true, that the colugo started off from some very early type, more nearly related to the pouch-bearers than the present insect-eaters are; while the monkeys, again, branched off long ago on another line quite separate from the modern lemurs. But if the tiny shrew wished, like many little people, to boast of distinguished connections, he might with justice suggest that somewhere among his primitive ancestors one would probably be found whose descendants had risen far higher in the world than himself.

* * * * *

It may perhaps seem strange to many readers that instead of leaving the apes and monkeys to the last, as standing at the head of the animal kingdom, we should bring them in now, directly after such lowly creatures as hedgehogs and mice, bats and beavers. It must, however, be repeatedly borne in mind that we are not following a direct line upwards, but a family tree, which branches in all directions; and though the gap between monkeys and insectivora may be great, yet they have many more points in common than the monkeys have with any of the vegetable-feeders or carnivorous animals, and probably we should find these links even more marked if it were not that we know so very little of the early history of Monkeys. The reason of this probably is that they live and die in woods, where any remains of their bodies not eaten by other animals decay and crumble to dust, so that we have only here and there a few skeletons to tell any tale of their ancestors. And so it comes to pass that when we first meet with the great army of milk-givers (see p. 209), lemurs, and soon after true monkeys, existed, with thumbs on their hands and grasping great toes on their feet.

In those times, when the climate of Europe and North America was warm and genial, they spread far and wide with the other animals over Germany, England, and the United States, where forests of palms, fig-trees, and evergreens afforded them a congenial home. But as soon as these began to fail and the climate of the northern countries became cold and cheerless, we find the monkey-kingdom growing narrower and narrower, till in our own day, while the flesh-feeders range from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, and the vegetarians have their reindeers travelling over ice and snow on the one hand, and their hippopotamuses and giraffes wandering under the burning sun of Africa on the other, the tender monkeys, which shiver in cold and damp and are constant victims to consumption, have shrunk back into the Tropics, where there is abundance of fruit and vegetation for their food. It is true a few kinds still linger in Japan, and one[151] on the sunny Rock of Gibraltar, while one or two wander up the mountains of Tibet into the regions of frost and snow; but, on the whole, monkeys are essentially inhabitants of warm countries, where the trees are perpetually covered with leaves and fruit, as in the luxuriant forests of South Asia and Tropical Africa in the Old World, and Tropical America in the New.

Though they have but a narrow kingdom, however, there can be no doubt that they make the most of it, and have managed to develop shrewdness and a sense of fun and frolic which would be quite unaccountable if it were not for one peculiarity which they possess. This peculiarity is the grasping power of their hands and feet, which has caused them to become such active nimble creatures, swinging, leaping, and running quickly along the boughs of the tangled forests in which they live.

Yet the monkeys do not stand alone in this

Footnote 151. The Magot, Macacusinuus.

grasping power, for we have seen that the opossums have hind-thumbs among the pouch-bearers, while among the rodents the little dormouse has a nailless grasping toe-thumb on his hind feet. So that here already we have some clue to possible descendants of poor relations of the monkeys down in the lower forms of life; and when we remember that the colugo (see p. 232) is related on the one hand to marsupials and insect-eaters, while on the other it leans towards the lemurs, and through them to the monkeys, we begin to suspect that somewhere low down in all these groups we might find ourselves among a family party from which all the different branches have sprung; just as we found the birds, reptiles, and milk-givers starting in past ages among the amphibia.

It must, however, be very long ago since the monkeys scrambled to the top of this family tree, for even the Lemurs,—which are not true monkeys, but a lower type with an irregular number of teeth like the insect-eaters, hairy hands and fox-like faces, without any change of expression,—have well-developed thumbs and toe-thumbs, with nails on hands and feet, and they have besides that free movement of the arm and wrist which gives at once an advantage to the Quadrumana[152] or four-handed animals.

These lemurs are a gentle and loving race of

Footnote 152. Naturalists now class monkeys under the order “Primates” (or highest forms), together with man, and they have given up the term Quadrumana, or four-handed, because, although the feet grasp like hands, they are true feet. Nevertheless, this term is very useful; and, if properly understood, expresses the grasping power of the four feet characteristic of the group.

creatures, which run on all fours like cats, and have none of the mischievous half-reasoning pranks of monkeys. They must have crept down long long ago from the great battlefield of Europe and Asia, and taken refuge in the forests of South Africa and India, and especially in the Island of Madagascar, where they were sheltered from the attacks of larger and fiercer animals. They are splendid climbers, with very sensitive tips to their fingers, which are often of different lengths, and many of them have eyes with pupils which expand and contract like those of a cat, enabling them to see well by day and night, while a quick sense of hearing warns them of any danger near.

In India, indeed, their relations the “Lories” are most of them slow-moving night-loving animals, while in South Africa the “Galagos” sleep all day in a nest of leaves, and are only active at night, crying to each other as they leap from bough to bough, seizing the beetles and moths in their little hands. It was probably from such night-wanderers as these that the general name of “lemurs” or “ghost-like” animals was given to the group, for the true lemurs, which live in Madagascar,—their special home, where they have few enemies,—may be seen by day running along the branches, snatching the fruit, sucking birds’ eggs, and even feeding on the young birds themselves, for they have plenty of crushing teeth, as well as incisors for clipping the leaves. Sometimes they sit in companies, huddled together, wrapping their soft furry tails round each other’s necks, for they are chilly creatures, and even in that warm country their thick tails, which are quite useless for clinging, seem to be a comfort to them. More often they are running and jumping, especially in the evening time, the mothers carrying their naked little ones nestled in the fur of their stomach, or, when they are older, on their backs; and whether slow or quick, day-lovers or night-hunters, these happy thoughtless little beings flourish in the quiet island home they have found, cut off from the struggling world beyond.

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