BATS
“Which of you three can tell me what bats feed upon?” asked Uncle Paul
the next day.
At this question Emile put on his thinking-cap, closing his eyes and
rubbing his forehead; but no ideas came. Nor were Jules and Louis any
prompter with an answer.
“Nobody knows? Well, then, so much the better, for you will have the
satisfaction of finding it out for yourselves, from the shape of the
teeth. The incisors, small and weak, which you see on an enlarged scale
in this picture of a bat’s set of teeth—do they look as if they were
made for gnawing vegetable substances, after the manner of rats and
rabbits? Could they cut any such tough fodder?”
“Certainly not,” replied Jules; “they are too weak to be of much use.
And then it seems to me those two sharp, curved fangs must belong to a
flesh-eating animal.”
“The long, pointed canines do indicate as much, but the molars show it
perhaps still more plainly. With their strong and sharp indented crowns
fitting so well into the sharp-edged depressions of the opposite
jaw—are those molars designed to crush grain, to grind, slowly and
patiently, fibrous substances?”
“No,” said Jules; “they are the teeth of a flesh-eater, not the
grist-mill of an herbivorous animal.”
“I am sure now,” affirmed Louis, “that the bat lives on prey.”
“It is a greedy hunter of flesh and blood,” Emile declared. “The cat’s
teeth are not more savage-looking.”
“All that is quite correct,” said Uncle Paul. “The teeth have taught
you the chief thing about the animal’s habits. Yes, the bat is a
hunter, an eater of live prey, a little ogre always demanding fresh
meat. It only remains to find out the kind of game it likes. Evidently
the size of the prey must suit the size of the hunter. A bat’s head is
no bigger than a large hazelnut. It is true the mouth is split from ear
to ear and can, when wide open, swallow mouthfuls larger than the
smallness of the animal would lead one to suppose. Nevertheless the bat
can attack only small creatures. What can it be that it goes chasing
through the air when, after sunset, it flies hither and thither
unceasingly?”
“Gnats, perhaps, and night-moths,” Jules suggested.
“Exactly. Those are its prey. The bat lives on insects exclusively. All
are food for its maw: hard-winged beetles, slender mosquitoes, plump
moths, flying insects of all sorts; in fact, all the little winged foes
of our cereals, vines, fruit-trees, woolen stuffs—all those creatures
of the air that come in the evening, attracted by our lighted rooms,
and singe their wings in the flames of our lamps. Who would undertake
to say how many insects bats destroy when they fly around a house? The
game is so small, and the hunter is so hungry.
“Notice what happens on a calm summer evening. Lured abroad by the
balmy atmosphere of the twilight hours, a host of insects leave their
lurking-places and come forth, guests at life’s garden party, to sport
together in the air, hunt for food, and mate with one another. It is
the hour when the sphinx-moths fly abruptly from flower to flower and
thrust their long probosces into the depths of the corollas, where
honey is stored; the hour when the mosquito, thirsting for human blood,
sounds its war-cry in our ears and selects our tenderest spot to stab
with its poisoned lancet; the hour when the June-bug leaves the shelter
of the leaf, spreads its buzzing wings, and goes humming through the
air in quest of its fellows. The gnats dance in joyous swarms which the
slightest breath of wind disperses like a column of smoke; butterflies
and moths, in wedding-garments, their wings powdered with silvery dust
and their antennæ spread out like plumes, join in the frolic or seek
places in which to deposit their eggs; the wood-borer comes forth from
its hidden retreat under the bark of the elm; the weevil breaks its
cell hollowed out in a grain of wheat; the plume-moths rise in clouds
from the granaries and fly toward the fields of ripe cereals; other
moths explore here the grape-vines, there the pear-trees, apple-trees,
cherry-trees, busily seeking food and shelter for their evil progeny.
“But in the midst of these festive assemblies suddenly there comes a
killjoy. It is the bat, which flies hither and thither, up and down,
appearing and disappearing, darting its head out this side and that,
and each time snapping up an insect on the wing, crushing and
swallowing it immediately. The hunting is good; gnats, beetles, and
moths abound; and every now and then a little cry of joy announces the
capture of a plump June-bug. As long as the fading twilight permits,
the eager hunter thus pursues its work of extermination. Satisfied at
last, the bat flies back to its somber and quiet retreat. The next
evening and all through the summer the hunt is resumed, always with the
same ardor, always at the expense of insects only.
“To give you an idea of the multitude of harmful insects, especially of
moths, from which the bat delivers us, I will quote a passage from the
celebrated French naturalist Buffon, the most graphic historian of the
animal kingdom. But first I must tell you that bats are in the habit of
making their homes in old towers, grottoes, and abandoned quarries.
There, in great numbers, they pass the daylight hours, hanging
motionless from the roof, and thence they sally forth at the approach
of darkness. The floor of these retreats becomes covered at last with a
deep layer of droppings, from which we can learn the kind of food eaten
by bats and judge of the importance of their hunting. Now here is what
Buffon has to say of a grotto frequented by these creatures:
“Having one day descended into the grottoes of Arci, I was
surprised to find there a kind of earth of a singular nature. It
formed a bed of blackish matter several feet thick, almost entirely
composed of parts of the wings and feet of flies and moths, as if
these insects had gathered here in immense numbers, coming together
for the express purpose of dying and rotting in company. It was
nothing but bats’ dung that had been accumulating for years.”
“What a curious kind of soil, made up entirely of the remains of dead
insects!” Jules exclaimed.
“I will add that sometimes this soil of flies and moths at the bottom
of old quarries and caves is abundant enough for the farmer to take
account of it and use it as a rich fertilizer. It is called bats’
guano.”
“To make such heaps of it, then,” remarked Louis, “bats must destroy
insects by millions and millions.”
“Five or six dozen flies or moths are hardly enough for a bat’s evening
meal; if a few June-bugs should make their appearance, they would be
eagerly snapped up. If the band of hunters is a large one, judge of the
thousands of harmful insects destroyed in a single season. Next to the
birds we have no more valiant helpers than bats; and so I beg you to be
friendly to these creatures which, while we are asleep and perhaps
dreaming of our rich crops of pears and apples, peaches and grapes and
grain, proceed with their silent warfare against the enemies of our
harvests, and every evening destroy by myriads moths, mosquitoes,
beetles, bugs—in short, the greater part of the insect throng that
always threatens us with starvation if we do not keep vigilant watch.”
“I see now that the bat does us a good turn,” Emile admitted. “All the
same, it is frightfully ugly; and, besides, they say if it touches you
it will give you the itch.”
“There are any number of other sayings about it that are just as
foolish, my boy. One is that the bat pricks with its pointed teeth the
she-goat’s udders so as to suck her blood and milk; another is that it
gnaws the sausages and bacon hung under the chimney mantel; also, that
its sudden entrance into a house means misfortune. I have heard persons
cry out because a bat had accidentally grazed them with the tip of its
wing; and I have seen others pale with terror because they had found
one of the innocent creatures fastened by a claw to their bed curtains.
“Here, as in many other things, my dear children, you must take into
account the folly of mankind, which is more given to error than to
truth. If you were old enough to understand me, I should add that
wherever I find a general agreement that a thing is black I think it
well to look into the matter and find out whether, on the contrary, it
may not be white. We are so stuffed with false notions that very often
the exact opposite of the common belief is the real truth. Do you ask
for examples? There are plenty of them.
“The sun, we generally say, according to all appearances revolves from
east to west around the stationary earth. No, says science, no, it is
the earth, on the contrary, that rotates from west to east before the
stationary sun. The stars, we say again, are small bright points,
little lamps in the arch of the firmament. No, answers science, the
stars are not tiny sparks; they are enormous bodies which compare in
light and size to the sun itself, a million and a half times as large
as the earth. The bat, it is commonly asserted, is a harmful, hideous,
venomous creature of ill omen that must be crushed without mercy under
the heel. No, affirms science, a thousand times no; the bat is an
inoffensive creature that, instead of doing us harm and bringing
misfortune, renders us an immense service by protecting the good things
of the earth from their countless destroyers.
“No, we should not vent our hatred upon it and pitilessly kill it; on
the contrary, we should like and respect it as one of our best helpers.
The poor creature does not deserve the bad reputation that ignorance
has given it. Its touch does not communicate either lice or the itch;
its teeth do not pierce the goat’s udders or attack our stores of
bacon; its chance entrance into a room is no more to be dreaded than a
butterfly’s. For my part I should like to have it visit my bedroom
often at night, for then I should soon be rid of the mosquitoes that
torment me. All things considered, we have nothing, absolutely nothing
to reproach it with, and we are indebted to it for very valuable
services. That is the answer of science to ignorant prejudice.
Henceforth, then, crush the bat under your heel if you dare.”
“I will take good care,” said Louis, “never to do such a thing now that
I know what an army of enemies we are guarded against by the bat.”
“But what a pity,” Jules remarked, “that it is such a hideous
creature!”
“Hideous?” his uncle repeated. “That is a slander which I hope to make
you take back.”
“Surely you can’t deny that the bat is horribly ugly,” persisted the
boy.
“Perhaps I can.”
“I should like to know,” said Emile, “how you can make out that the
frightful shape of the creature is beautiful.”
“To discuss ugliness and beauty with you, my children,” replied Uncle
Paul, “is not an undertaking that I should care to enter upon. To
follow me in such a discussion you would need a maturity of mind that
does not go with your years. Even if you were grown up, it might still
be impossible for us to come to an agreement, inasmuch as it is not
with the bodily eyes that ugliness and beauty should be judged, but
with the eyes of reason ripened by reflection and study and free from
the trammels of first impressions, which are generally erroneous. Also,
how few possess that intellectual clearness of vision that remains
untroubled by prematurely conceived opinions and can thus contemplate
things in all the clarity of truth! Trusting the testimony of our eyes
and yielding to daily habit, we call beautiful the creatures whose
general structure shows a certain conformity with that of the animals
most familiar to us and unthinkingly accepted as standards for all
future judgments. We call ugly those that differ from these accepted
models, and if very unlike we call them hideous. Enlightened reason
refuses to be hemmed in by the narrow circle of first impressions; it
rises above petty prejudices and says to itself: Nothing is ugly that
God has made; everything is beautiful, everything is perfect in itself,
as everything is the work of the Creator.
“An animal’s form should not be judged by its greater or less
resemblance to the forms that are already familiar to us and serve us
as standards of comparison, but rather by its fitness for the kind of
life for which it was created. Where the structure is in perfect
harmony with the functions to be performed, there too is beauty. From
this higher point of view ugliness no longer exists; or, rather, it
exists all too abundantly, but only in the moral world. Intemperance,
laziness, stupid pride—all forms of vice, in short—constitute ugliness
and hideousness. To tell the truth, I know of none besides.
“But I must return to the bat, if not in the hope of making you find it
beautiful, at least with the certainty of interesting you in its
remarkable structure. I will wager, too, that not one of you knows what
a bat is.”
“It is a kind of bird,” declared Emile.
“It is an old rat that has grown a pair of wings,” Jules ventured to
assert.
“You are both talking nonsense,” returned their uncle. “That is the way
with us all: we speak at random of animals and persons, giving to one
our esteem, to another our scorn, without knowing what they are, what
they do, what they are good for. You don’t know the first thing about
the bat, and yet you overwhelm the poor animal with abuse.
“The bat has nothing in common with birds; it has neither beak nor
feathers; nor is it a rat that has acquired wings in its old age. It is
really a peculiar creature that is born, lives, and dies with wings,
without in any way belonging to the bird family. Its body has the size,
the fur, and somewhat the shape of a mouse; but its wings are bare.
“The most highly organized animals have as a distinctive mark teats or
udders, which furnish milk, the first food of their young. These
animals do not feed their young family from the beak, as birds do; they
do not abandon their offspring to all the hazards of good or ill
fortune, careless of their future, as do the stupid races of reptiles
and fish. The females rear their young with maternal care, feeding them
from time to time with milk from their udders. All the various species
that suckle their young, all that are provided with udders, are classed
together by men of learning and called mammals, from the Latin mamma, a
breast or teat. I will add that in the great majority of instances
these animals have the body covered with fur or hair, and not with
feathers or scales. Feathers belong to birds, scales to reptiles and
fishes. As examples of mammals you will immediately think of our
domestic animals, the dog, the cat, the cow, the sheep, the goat, the
horse, and others.”
“I have often noticed,” said Emile, “how carefully the cat raises her
family. While the kittens press her teats with their little pink paws
to make the milk flow faster, the old cat washes them with her tongue
and shows her happiness by her soft purring.”
“Well, then,” resumed Uncle Paul, “the bat is a mammal just as much as
is the cat, and like that of the cat its body is protected from the
cold by fur, and the female has teats for nursing her little ones. The
number of teats varies widely in the different kinds of animals, being
greater in the species that have many young at a birth, and less in the
others; which is as it should be, in order that the nurslings may all
be suckled at the same time. The bat has only two, situated on the
breast and not under the stomach. The female bears only a single young
one at a time. Emile rightly admires the love of the cat for her
kittens; yet the bat is a still tenderer mother. When in the evening
she goes out in search of food, instead of leaving her nursling in some
hole in the wall after suckling it, she carries it with her, clinging
to her breast; and it is while weighted with this load that she chases
the nimble moths on the wing. Doubtless the pursuit of prey is thus
rendered less fruitful and more difficult; but no matter, the loving
mother prefers not to abandon her feeble charge, and allows it to
continue peacefully sucking during the evolutions of the hunt. With the
deepening darkness the bat regains its retreat, suspends itself from
the roof by a toe-nail, and holds its nursling by wrapping it in her
wings.”
“That is not so bad a way to behave,” admitted Jules. “I begin to find
the bat less ugly than I thought.”
“That is what I just told you,” returned his uncle. “Ugliness is
begotten of ignorance; it diminishes as knowledge increases. But let us
continue our theme.”