general reader if he could have led off with some imposing beast--the
extinct wolf or tusky wild boar, for example--or, better still, with
the white cattle of Chillingham, or the roaring stag with his grand
antlers. The last is an undoubted survival, one which, encountered in
some incult place where it is absolutely free and wild, moves us to a
strange joy--an inherited memory and a vision of a savage, prehistoric
land of which we are truer natives than we can ever be of this smooth
sophisticated England. The science of zoology could not have it so,
since it does not and cannot take man and his mental attitude towards
other forms of life into account--cannot consider the fact that he is
himself an animal of prey, several feet high, with large eyes fitted
to look at large objects, and that he measures and classifies all
creatures by an instinctive rule and standard, mentally pitting his
strength and ferocity against theirs. What a discrepancy, then, between
things as seen by the natural man and as they appear in our scientific
systems, which make the small negligible bat the leader of the
procession of British beasts--even this repulsive little rearmouse, or
flittermouse, that flits from his evil-smelling cranny, in appearance a
misshapen insect of unusual size, to pursue his crooked, broken-boned,
squeaky flight in the obscurity of evening.
Imagine the effect of this modern rearrangement of the mammals on the
mammals if they knew! The white bull of Chillingham would shake his
frowning front and the stag his branching antlers in scorn; the wolf,
in spite of being extinct, would howl; the British seal bark; the
wild cat snarl, and the badger make free use of his most underground
expressions of rage at such an insult; rabbit and hare would exchange
looks of astonishment and apprehension; the hedgehog would roll himself
into a ball with disgust; the mole sink back into his run; the fox
smile sardonically; and the whole concourse, turning their backs on the
contemptible leader thrust on them, would march off in the opposite
direction.
Now the imaginary case of these beasts offended in their dignity fairly
represents that of humanity angry at the intolerable insult implied in
the Darwinian notion. But we have now so far outgrown that feeling that
it is no longer an offence for the zoologist to tell us not only that
we are related to the lemur with its luminous opalescent or topaz eyes,
that are like the eyes of angels and are instinct with a mysterious
intelligence when they look at us with a strange friendliness in them
as if they knew what we, after thousands of years of thinking, have
only just found out--not only that this animal is our relation, but
even such a creature as the bat!
Look on this picture, and on this! On the eyes, for instance, of these
two beasts, and we see at once that the bat is an example of extreme
degeneration; also that it is the most striking example in the animal
world of a degenerate in which the downward process has at length been
arrested, and instead of extinction a new, different, and probably
infinitely longer life given to it.
We are reminded of the flea--the remote descendant, as we deem, of a
gilded fly that was once free of the air and feasted at the same sunlit
flowery table with bright-winged butterflies and noble wasps and bees.
There are those who have doubts about this genealogical tree of the
bat, and would have it that he is an insectivore related to moles,
shrews, and such-like low-down animals, but the main facts all
point the other way. And we may assume that the bat--our familiar
flittermouse, since we are not concerned with the somewhat different
frugivorous bats of the tropics--is the remote descendant of a small
degenerate lemur that inhabited the upper branches of high trees in the
African forest; that he became exclusively insectivorous and developed
an extreme activity in capturing his winged prey, and was in fact
like the existing small lemur, the golago, which in pursuing insects
“seems literally to fly through the air,” as Sir H. Johnston has said.
Finally, there was the further development, the ovidean metamorphosis,
when the loose expanding membrane of the hands and arms and sides grew
to wings.
But albeit like a bird in its faculty of flight, the bat was a mammal
still, and was rather like a badly constructed flying-machine, at best
an improvement on the parachute. This then was a risky experiment on
Nature’s part, seeing that to launch a mammal on the air is to put it
into competition with birds, and throw it in the way of its rapacious
bird enemies, natives of that element and infinitely its superior in
flying powers. But Nature, we see, takes risks of this kind with a
very light heart; her busy brain teems with thousands, millions, of
inventions, and if nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand go wrong,
she simply scraps them and goes cheerfully on with her everlasting
business. An amusing person! One can imagine some Principality or High
Intelligence, a visitor from Aldebaran, let us say, looking on at these
queer doings on her part and remarking: “My dear, what a silly fool you
are to waste so much energy in trying to do an impossible thing.”
And--nettled at his air of superiority--her sharp reply:
“Oh yes, now you say that, I’m reminded of a visitor I once had
from--oh, I don’t know exactly where--somewhere in the Milky Way--just
when I was experimenting with my snake idea. To make a vertebrate
without any organs of progression, yet capable of getting freely
about--ha, ha, ha, how very funny! I’d like him to come back now to
show him a tree-snake with a cylindrical body two yards long and no
thicker than a man’s middle finger, green as a green leaf and smooth as
ivory, going as freely about in a tree as a cat or a monkey. Also my
blue sea-snake, cleaving the water like a fish; also my ground-serpents
of numberless types, moving swiftly over the earth with a grace
surpassing that of creatures endowed with organs of progression.”
But not a word did she say about the flying-fish, which was not a great
success.
Then he: “Well, I should advise the person from the Milky Way to keep
out of _your_ way. No doubt you have done clever things, but the snake
problem was not so very difficult after all. You thought of the rib and
the scale, and the thing was done.”
And she: “Yes, it was quite simple, and so when I wanted to make
reptiles fly I thought of this and of that and of something else and
the thing was done.”
Then he: “Yes, yes, my dear lady--that was clever, too, no doubt; only
your flying lizard wasn’t wound up to go on for ever--not as a lizard
at all events; and what I should like you to tell me is: When you have
got your little beast in the air how are you going to get him to stay
there?”
Her sharp reply was: “By thinking,” for she was angry at his
supercilious Aldebaran airs. And, put on her mettle, it was only by
sheer hard thinking that she finally succeeded in accomplishing her
object--this, too, as it were, by means of a subtle trick. For the bird
problem had been a very different one; her experiments with flying
lizards had suggested it, and she was able to create this new and
finer being an inhabitant of the air by giving it its peculiar pointed
wedge shape, its covering of feathers, with feathers for flight--hard
as steel, light as gossamer, bloodless, nerveless. And correlated
with shape and flight and life in the air, a development of power of
vision which, compared with that of mammals and reptiles, is like a
supernatural faculty.
Her subtle trick, in the case of the bat, was to reverse the process
followed in building up the bird; to suspend her beast head down by the
toes instead of making him perch with his head up to keep it cool; to
neglect the vision altogether as of little or no account; and, on the
other hand, instead of the light, hard, nerveless feather wings, to
make the flying apparatus the most sensitive thing in Nature, barring
the antennae of insects; a bed and field of nerves, so closely placed
as to give the membrane the appearance of the finest, softest shot
silk. The brains of the creature, as it were, are carried spread out on
its wings, and so exquisitely delicate is the sensitiveness of these
parts that in comparison our finger-tips are no more quick of feeling
than the thick tough hide of some lumbering pachyderm.
I have handled scores of bats in my time, and have never had one in my
hand without being struck by its shrinking, shivering motions, the
tremors that passed over it like wave following wave, and it has seemed
to me that the touch of a soft finger-tip on its wing was to the bat
like a blow of a cheese- or bread-grater on his naked body to a man.
Now any one, even the intelligent foreigner from Aldebaran, would
have imagined that such a creature so constructed would not have
maintained its existence in this rough world: a sudden storm of rain
or hail encountered in mid-air would have destroyed it, and in its
pursuit of insects in leafy places it would have been exposed every
minute to disabling accidents. But it did not happen so. That exquisite
super-sensitiveness, that extra sense, or extra senses, since we do
not know how many there are, not only kept it in the air, able to
continue the struggle of life in the particular forest, the district,
the region, the continent where it came into being, but sent it abroad,
an invader and colonist, to other lands, other continents all over the
globe, including those far-off isolated islands which had been cut off
from all connexion with the rest of the earth before mammalian life
was evolved, and had no higher life than birds, until this small beast
came flying over the illimitable ocean on his wings, to be followed a
million years later by his noble relation in a canoe.
We see then that the bat is a very wonderful creature, one of Nature’s
triumphs and masterpieces, and on this account he has received a
good share of attention from the zoologists. Nevertheless, after
looking through a large amount of literature on the subject, the old
idea persists that we know little about the bat--little, that is to
say, compared with all there is to be known. How very little my own
researches can add to its life history these meagre observations and
comments will serve to show.
Walking by the Test, near Longparish, one evening, I noticed a number
of noctules, our great bat, gathered at a spot where some high trees,
elms and beeches, grew on the edge of a wet meadow. The bats were
flying up and down in front of the trees, feasting on the moths and
other insects that abounded there. I wondered how it came about that
these big bats had this rich table all to themselves, seeing that the
small common bat is by far the most numerous species in that locality.
After I had stood there watching them for a few minutes a common bat
appeared, and at once began flying to and fro among them; but very soon
he was spotted and attacked by a big bat, and then began the maddest
chase it was possible to see, the little one doubling wildly this
way and that, now mounting high in the air, then plunging downward
to the grass, anon losing himself in the trees, to reappear in a few
moments with his vicious persecutor sticking so close that the two
often seemed like one bat. Finally, they went away out of sight in the
distance, and keeping my eyes in the direction they had gone, I saw
the big one return alone in about seven or eight minutes and resume
his flying up and down with the others. It struck me that if I could
have followed or kept them in sight to the finish I should probably
have witnessed a little tragedy: the terror of the one and the fury
of the other suggested such an end. The keen teeth once fixed in his
victim’s neck, the noctule would wash his supper of moths and beetles
down with a draught of warm blood, then drop the dead body to the earth
before returning to his companions. This is conjecture; but we know
that bats have carnivorous propensities, and that in some exotic kinds
the big will kill the little, even their own young. Probably they all
have something of the vampire in them. The female bat is a most devoted
parent, carrying her young about when flying, wrapping them round with
her silken wings as with a shawl when in repose, suckling them at her
breast even as the highest of the mammalians do. One would not be
surprised to learn that the deadliest enemy of her little ones, the one
she fears most, is her own consort.
Whether bats migrate or not has long been a moot question, and Millais,
our latest authority, and certainly one of the best, has answered it
in the affirmative. But the migration he describes is nothing but a
change of locality--a retirement from their summer haunts to some
spot suitable for hibernation, in some instances but a few miles
distant. Other hibernating creatures--serpents, for example--have the
same habit, and though compelled to travel on their bellies, they do
nevertheless return year after year to the old laying-up places. The
question of a seasonal movement in bats, similar to migration in birds,
greatly exercised my young mind in former years in a country where bats
had no business to be. This was the level, grassy, practically treeless
immensity of the pampas, where there were no hollow trunks, nor caves
and holes for bats to shelter in, nor ruins and buildings of brick and
stone which would be a substitute for natural caverns. Human dwellings
were mostly mud and straw hovels, and the only trees were those planted
by man, and were not large and could not grow old. The violent winds
swept this floor of the world, which was unsheltered like the sea.
Yet punctually in spring the bats appeared along with the later bird
migrants, and were common until April, when they vanished, and then for
six months no bat would be seen in or out of doors. Clearly, then, they
were strictly migratory, able like birds to travel hundreds of miles
and to distribute themselves over a vast area. They were, in fact, both
migrants and hibernators, since we cannot but suppose that they forsook
the pampas only to find some distant place where they could pass their
inactive period in safety.
At one point, about two hundred miles south of Buenos Ayres city, the
level pampa is broken by a range of stony hills, or sierras, standing
above the flat earth like precipitous cliffs that face the sea. On my
first visit to that spot I travelled with a party of eight or nine
gauchos, and evening coming on near our destination, we camped about a
league from the foot of the hills and built a big fire. Just as we had
got a good blaze a loud cry of “Morcielagos!” (bats) from one of the
men made us look up, and there, overhead, appeared a multitude of bats,
attracted by the glare, rushing about in the maddest manner, like a
cloud of demented swifts. In a few moments they vanished, and we saw no
more of them. Bats, I found, were extremely abundant among these hills,
and here they were probably non-migratory.
But the main question about bats is always that of their sense-organs,
in which they differ not only from all other mammalians but from all
vertebrates, and if in this there is any resemblance or analogue to
any other form of life it is to the insect. As to insect senses we are
very much in the dark. The number of them may be seven or seventeen,
since insects appear to be affected by vibrations which do not touch
us. We exist, it has been said, in a bath of vibrations; so do all
living things; but in our case the parts by which they enter are
few; so too with all other vertebrates except the bat alone, and a
puzzle and mystery he remains. What, for example, are the functions
of the transverse bands on the wings formed of minute glands; the
enormous expanse of ears in the long-eared bat; the earlet, a curious
development of the tragus; and the singular leaf-like developments on
the nose of the horseshoe bat? We suppose that they are sense-organs,
but all we know, or half know, about the matter is ancient history; it
dates back to the eighteenth century, when Spallanzani, finding that
bats were independent of sight when blinded and set flying in winding
tunnels and other confined places, conjectured that they were endowed
with a sixth sense. Cuvier’s explanation of these experiments was
that the propinquity of solid bodies is perceived by the way in which
the air, moved by the pulsations, reacts on the surface of the wings.
Thus the sixth sense was a refinement, or extension, of the sense of
touch--an excessive sensitiveness in the membrane. Blind men, we know,
sometimes have a similar extreme sensibility of the skin of the face.
I have known one who was accustomed to spend some hours walking every
day in Kensington Gardens, taking short cuts in any direction among the
trees and never touching one, and no person seeing him moving so freely
about would have imagined that he was totally blind.
My own experiments on bats in South America were inconclusive. I used
to collect a dozen or twenty at a time, finding them sleeping by day
on the trees in shady places, and after sealing up their eyes with
adhesive gum, liberate them in a large room furnished with hanging
ropes and objects of various sizes suspended from the rafters. The bats
flew about without touching the walls, and deftly avoiding the numerous
obstacles; but I soon discovered that they were able when flying to
use the hooked claw on the wing to scratch the gum away and pull the
eyelids open, and whenever one came to grief I found that its lids had
not been opened.
One can see at once that an experiment of this kind is useless. The
irritation of the gum and the efforts being made to remove it by the
animal while flying cloud the extra sense or senses, and it loses its
efficiency.
What the bat can do I discovered by chance one summer afternoon in
an English lane. It was one of those deep Hampshire lanes one finds
between Selborne and Prior’s Dean, where I was walking just before
sunset, when two common bats appeared flying up and down the lane in
quest of flies, and always on coming to me they circled round and then
made a vicious little stoop at my head as if threatening to strike. My
brown and grey striped or mottled tweed caps and hats have often got
me into trouble with birds, as I have told in a chapter in _Birds and
Man_, and it was probably the colour of my cap on this occasion that
excited the animosity of this pair of bats. Again and again I waved my
stick over my head on seeing one approach, but it had not the slightest
effect--the bat would duck past it and pass over my cap, just grazing
it boldly as ever. Then I thought of a way to frighten them. My cane
was a slim pliable one, which gave me no support, and was used merely
to have something in my hand--a thin little cane such as soldiers
carry in their hands off duty. Holding it above my head, I caused it
to spin round so rapidly that it was no longer a cane in appearance,
but a funnel-shaped mist moving with and above me as I walked. “Now,
you little rascal,” said I, chuckling to myself as the bat came; then
making the usual quick circle he dashed down through the side of the
misty obstruction, made his demonstration over my cap, and passed
out on the other side. I could hardly credit the evidence of my own
eyes, and thought he had escaped a blow by pure luck, and that if he
attempted it a second time he would certainly be killed. I didn’t want
to kill him, but the thing was really too remarkable to be left in
doubt, and so I resumed the whirling of the stick over my head, and in
another moment the second bat came along, and, like the first, dashed
down at my cap, passing in and out of the vortex with perfect ease
and safety! Again and again they doubled back and repeated the action
without touching the stick, and after witnessing it a dozen or fifteen
times I could still hardly believe that their escape from injury was
anything but pure chance.
Here I recall the most wonderful flying feat I have witnessed in
birds--a very common one. Frequently when standing still among the
trees of a plantation or wood where humming-birds abounded, I have had
one dart at me, invisible owing to the extreme swiftness of its flight,
to become visible--to materialise, as it were--only when it suddenly
arrested its flight within a few inches of my face, to remain there
suspended motionless like a hover-fly on misty wings that produced a
loud humming sound; and when thus suspended, it has turned its body to
the right, then to the left, then completely round as if to exhibit its
beauty--its brilliant scale-like feathers changing their colours in the
sunlight as it turned. Then, in a few seconds, its curiosity gratified,
it has darted away, barely visible as a faint dark line in the air,
and vanished perhaps into the intricate branches of some tree, a black
acacia perhaps, bristling with long needle-sharp thorns.
The humming-bird is able to perform this feat a hundred times every
day with impunity by means of its brilliant vision and the exquisitely
perfect judgement of the brilliant little brain behind the sight. But
I take it that if the bird had attempted the feat of the bat it would
have killed itself.
It is a rule in wild life that nothing is attempted which is not
perfectly safe, though to us the action may appear dangerous in the
extreme, or even impossible. At all events, I can say that these bats
in a Selborne lane taught me more than all the books--they made me see
and understand the perfection of that extra sense.
But it is just that same sense which Spallanzani and Cuvier wrote
about, and we cannot but think that the bat has something more than
this. That peculiar disposition of glands and nerves on the wings,
the enormous size of the ear in the great-eared bat, the ear-leaf,
and leaf-nose, and the other developments and excrescences on the
face which give to some species a more grotesque countenance than was
ever imagined by any medieval artist in stone--these are doubtless all
sense-organs, and the question is, are these all additions to the one
sense we know of--an extension and refinement of the sense of touch? I
think they are more than that, and there are a few facts that incline
one to believe that knowledge comes to the bat through more ports than
one--knowledge of things far as well as near. One observation made by
Millais points to this conclusion. He noticed that a crowd of noctule
bats that sheltered in a hollow tree by day, on issuing in the evening
all took flight in the same direction, and that the line of flight was
not the same, but varied from day to day; that on following them up to
the feeding area he discovered that insects were always most abundant
at that spot on that evening. It came to this--that on issuing from the
hollow tree every bat in the crowd, issuing one or two at a time and
flying straight away, knew where to go, south, east, west, or north, to
some spot a mile or two away. The bat too, then, like the far-seeing
vulture, is “sagacious of his quarry from afar,” but what Nature has
given him in place of his dim, degenerate eyes to make him sagacious in
this way remains to be found out.
IV
BEAUTY OF THE FOX
It is only by a fortunate chance, a rare conjunction of circumstances,
that we are able to see any wild animal at its best. And by animal it
must be explained is here meant a hair-clothed vertebrate that suckles
its young and goes on four feet.
Chiefly on this account it would be hard in any company of men well
acquainted with our fauna to find two persons to agree as to which is
the handsomest or prettiest of our indigenous mammals.