bones of the arms, hands, and legs, like a kite with calico stretched on both sides (see Fig. 56, p. 220), and when the long fingers are outspread and the legs opened, no limbs will be seen, but only a small body and head, with an immense expanse of skinny wing, from which the short clawed thumbs and the four toes of the feet stick out before and behind.

Fig. 61.

Skeleton of a Bat.

(Lettered to compare with bird’s skeleton, p. 126).

fa, fore arm; w, wrist; t, thumb; ha, hand; h, heel; f, foot.

Now this creature is no longer like the flying squirrels or the colugo, which can only take floating leaps; for though like them it has only a membrane stretching out from its body, yet this has become a long flexible wing, formed on a widely outstretched arm and abnormally long hand, and moved by powerful muscles like the wings of birds or insects. It is essentially fitted for flitting through the air in search of prey, while it makes but little use of the running power which it possesses in common with all other insect-eaters. If you see a bat moving along the ground, you will acknowledge at once that it is a true quadruped, yet, by its awkward gait as it shuffles along on its clawed thumb and toes, you will judge that it is not an earth-loving animal. Watch it at night on the wing and it is quite another creature; then it will flit about in and out of cracks and crevices, under the eaves, round the haystacks, or among the trees, and never once strike its wings against anything, though it has been proved that it does not trust chiefly to its bead-like eyes to guide it.

Bats have been blinded, their ears stopped with wool, and their noses with sponge dipped in camphor; and yet, without sight, hearing, or smell, they steered quite successfully between outstretched threads or tree-branches, or found their way into a hole in the roof. In truth, as they have become fitted to navigate the air, they seem also to have become sensitive to its currents. Their wings are abundantly supplied with nerves and blood-vessels, and have little rough points all over the surface; their ears have generally a second ear-lobe or leaf within the outer one, and those which have not this have leaves of skin or membrane round their nose. With all these they seem to feel the slightest difference in the air, so as to detect at once whether they are in the open, or whether any resisting object is near them.

Fig. 62.

A Bat walking.

Now it is clear that a creature of this kind, able to chase insects in the air, even in the darkest night, can secure much food that the running insect-eaters can never reach. When the little common English bat, the Pipistrelle, awakes from his day’s sleep, which he has been taking, head downwards, hanging by his feet in some old tree or under the roof of a barn, he finds the gnats and flies abroad, and begins his chase in the twilight—up and down, from side to side he flits, and his wide-open mouth takes in insects at every turn. And by-and-by, as the dark nights come on, the Long-eared Bats begin gradually to stir from their clusters in the barns and old buildings, and, unfolding their wings so as to display their ears as long as their bodies, commit sad havoc among the night-moths. All night long their shrill squeak may be heard, but before day dawns they are away again, and may be found hanging in dense masses by their hind legs to the timbers of some old church belfry, or in caves, or even under the roofs of houses, where they find an entrance by some hole, and go in by hundreds to hang from the rafters.

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.

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