THE NOCTULE
THERE are perhaps no animals which are less studied by scientific men than bats, and consequently there is little cause for surprise that popular ideas about these creatures are so erroneous. There are many educated men and women who do not know whether a bat is a mammal or a bird, and a man once asked me it it was not "a kind of insect." Even expert zoologists often confess that they cannot distinguish between the commoner species, and lamentably little is known about the distribution and habits, though bats occur in nearly every part of the British Isles.
Daubenton first described the noctule, or great bat, but it was Gilbert White who identified it as an inhabitant of Britain. He called it Vespertilio altivolans "from its manner of flying high in the air," a characteristic which, though by no means invariable, is very useful as a means of identification. The noctule is the largest British bat, considerably bigger than its near relative, Leisler's bat, and slightly exceeding the greater horseshoe and serotine. The evidence of the occurrence of the mouse-coloured bat, V. murinus, in England is so slender that it cannot be accepted as a native. The name V. murinus was for long applied to the "common bat," the pipistrelle, showing how little intercourse existed in the early part of last century between the British and continental naturalists, for the mouse-coloured bat was well known then as the common bat of the Continent. It is strange that there should have been confusion between animals that varied so much in size as this bat and our little pipistrelle. The
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