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:
'Trembling the spectres glide, and plaintive vent
Their hollow screams along the deep descent,
As in the cavern of some rifted den,
Where flock nocturnal bats, and birds obscene;
Clustered they hang, till at some sudden shock
They move, and murmurs run through all the rock.
So cowering fled the sable heap of ghosts."
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.
