Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon. Robert Armitage Sterndale
leaf buds, insects, eggs, and young birds. Sir Emerson Tennent says the Singhalese assert that it has been known to strangle pea-fowl at night and feast on the brain, but this I doubt. Smaller birds it might overcome. Jerdon states that in confinement it will eat boiled rice, plantains, honey or syrup and raw meat. McMaster, at page 6 of his 'Notes on Jerdon,' gives an interesting extract from an old account of 'Dr. John Fryer's Voyage to East India and Bombain,' in which he describes this little animal as "Men of the Woods, or more truly Satyrs;" asleep during the day; but at "Night they Sport and Eat." "They had Heads like an owl. Bodied like a monkey without Tails. Only the first finger of the Right Hand was armed with a claw like a bird, otherwise they had hands and feet which they walk upright on, not pronely, as other Beasts do."
These little creatures double themselves up when they sleep, bending the head down between their legs. Although so sluggish generally, Jerdon says they can move with considerable agility when they choose.
There is a curious link between the Lemurs and the Bats in the Colugos. (Galæopithecus): their limbs are connected with a membrane as in the Flying Squirrels, by which they can leap and float for a hundred yards on an inclined plane. They are mild, inoffensive animals, subsisting on fruits and leaves. Cuvier places them after the Bats, but they seem properly to link the Lemurs and the frugivorous Bats. As yet they have not been found in India proper, but are common in the Malayan Peninsula, and have been found in Burmah.
NATIVE NAME.—Myook-hloung-pyan, Burmese.
HABITAT.—Mergui; the Malayan Peninsula.
DESCRIPTION.—Fur olive brown, mottled with irregular whitish spots and blotches; the pile is short, but exquisitely soft; head and brain very small; tail long and prehensile. The membrane is continued from each side of the neck to the fore feet; thence to the hind feet, again to the tip of the tail. This animal is also nocturnal in its habits, and very sluggish in its motions by day, at which time it usually hangs from a branch suspended by its fore hands, its mottled back assimilating closely with the rugged bark of the tree; it is exclusively herbivorous, possessing a very voluminous stomach, and long convoluted intestines. Wallace says of it, that its brain is very small, and it possesses such tenacity of life that it is very difficult to kill; he adds that it is said to have only one at a birth, and one he shot had a very small blind naked little creature clinging closely to its breast, which was quite bare and much wrinkled. Raffles, however, gives two as the number produced at each birth. Dr. Cantor says that in confinement plantains constitute the favourite food, but deprived of liberty it soon dies. In its wild state it "lives entirely on young fruits and leaves; those of the cocoanut and Bombax pentandrum are its favourite food, and it commits great injury to the plantations of these."—Horsfield's 'Cat. Mam.' Regarding its powers of flight, Wallace, in his 'Travels in the Malay Archipelago,' says: "I saw one of these animals run up a tree in a rather open space, and then glide obliquely through the air to another tree on which it alighted near its base, and immediately began to ascend. I paced the distance from one tree to the other, and found it to be seventy yards, and the amount of descent not more than thirty-five or forty feet, or less than one in five. This, I think, proves that the animal must have some power of guiding itself through the air, otherwise in so long a distance it would have little chance of alighting exactly upon the trunk."
There is a carefully prepared skeleton of this animal in the Indian Museum in Calcutta.
ORDER CARNARIA
It may seem strange to many that such an insignificant, weird little creature as a bat should rank so high in the animal kingdom as to be but a few removes from man. It has, however, some striking anatomical affinities with the last Order, Quadrumana, sufficient to justify its being placed in the next link of the great chain of creation.
"Bats have the arms, fore-arms and fingers excessively elongated, so as to form with the membrane that occupies their intervals, real wings, the surface of which is equally or more extended than in those of birds. Hence they fly high and with great rapidity."—Cuvier. They suckle their young at the breast, but some of them have pubic warts resembling mammæ. The muscles of the chest are developed in proportion, and the sternum has a medial ridge something like that of a bird. They are all nocturnal, with small eyes (except in the case of the frugivorous bats), large ears, and in some cases membranous appendages to the nostrils, which may possibly be for the purpose of guiding themselves in the dark, for it is proved by experiment that bats are not dependent on eyesight for guidance, and one naturalist has remarked that, in a certain species of bat which has no facial membrane, this delicacy of perception was absent. I have noticed this in one species, Cynopterus marginatus, one of which flew into my room not long ago, and which repeatedly dashed itself against a glass door in its efforts to escape. I had all the other doors closed.
Bats are mostly insectivorous; a few are fruit-eaters, such as our common flying-fox. They produce from one to two at a birth, which are carried about by the mother and suckled at the breast, this peculiarity being one of the anatomical details alluded to as claiming for the bats so high a place.
Bats are divided into four sub-families—Pteropodidæ, Vampyridæ, Noctilionidæ, and Vespertilionidæ.
These are frugivorous bats of large size, differing, as remarked by Jerdon, so much in their dentition from the insectivorous species that they seem to lead through the flying Lemurs (Colugos) directly to the Quadrumana. The dentition is more adapted to their diet; they have cutting incisors to each jaw, and grinders with flat crowns, and their intestines are longer than those of the insectivorous bats. They produce but one at birth, and the young ones leave their parents as soon as they can provide for themselves. The tongue is covered with rough papillæ. They have no tail. These bats and some of the following genus, which are also frugivorous, are distinguished from the rest of the bats by a claw on the first or index finger, which is short.
Dental formula: Inc., 4/4; can., 1—1/1—1; premolars, 2—2/3—3; molars, 3—3/3—3.
NATIVE NAMES.—Badul, Bengali and Mahratti; Wurbagul, Hindi; Toggul bawali, Canarese; Sikurayi, Telegu.
HABITAT.—All through India, Ceylon, and Burmah.
DESCRIPTION.—Head and nape rufous black; neck and shoulders golden yellow (the hair longer); back dark brown; chin dark; rest of body beneath fulvous or rusty brown; interfemoral membrane brownish black.—Jerdon.
SIZE.—Length, 12 to 14 inches; extent of wings, 46 to 52 inches.
These bats roost on trees in vast numbers. I have generally found them to prefer tamarinds of large size. Some idea of the extent of these colonies may be gathered from observations by McMaster, who attempted to calculate the number in a colony. He says: "In five minutes a friend and I counted upwards of six hundred as they passed over head, en route to their feeding grounds; supposing their nightly exodus to continue for twenty minutes, this would give upwards of two thousand in one roosting place, exclusive of those who took a different direction."
Tickell's account of these colonies is most graphic, though Emerson Tennent has also given a most interesting and correct account of their habits. The former writes:—"From the arrival of the first comer until the sun is high above the horizon, a scene of incessant wrangling and contention is enacted among them, as each endeavours to secure a higher and better place, or to eject a neighbour from too close vicinage. In these struggles the bats hook themselves along the branches, scrambling about hand over hand with some speed, biting each other severely, striking out with the long claw of the thumb, shrieking and cackling without