“They are guided especially by their senses of smell and hearing, which are extraordinarily acute. What do you say to the bat’s ears in this picture? What animal of its size can show anything like them? How they flare, like enormous hearing-trumpets, to receive the slightest sound! The bat that bears them has the expressive name of long-eared bat.” “Long-eared bat,” repeated Jules; “that’s the kind of name I like; it describes the animal and shows what there is about it that is out of the ordinary.” “Such prodigious ears are certainly made to hear sounds inaudible to us by reason of their excessive faintness. They enable their possessor to hear at a distance the beating of a moth’s wings and the fluttering of a gnat dancing in the air. “Other bats which have smaller ears have as a substitute a sense of smell unequaled for its acuteness. The high state of perfection of this sense is the result of the abnormal development of the nose, which covers a good part of the face and gives the animal a very strange appearance. For example, here is the head of a bat called the horseshoe bat. This broad, distended formation of curious shape that occupies almost the whole space between the eyes and the mouth is the nose. It ends above in a large triangular, leaflike expanse; laterally it spreads out in folded laminæ, all together taking the shape of a horseshoe, whence the name of the creature. What odor, however faint, could escape such a nose? The dog, so famous for its keenness of scent, chases the hare without seeing it, guided solely by the odor left behind by the animal, heated in the chase; but how much keener the scent of the horseshoe bat must be when it chases in the same manner a moth that leaves no odor for any nose but its pursuer’s! I sometimes wonder whether such a nose, so abnormally developed, may not be able to detect certain qualities that are and always will be unknown to us for want of the means to perceive them. The horseshoe bat’s grotesque nose makes you laugh, my little friends; it makes me think. I think of the thousand secrets that nature hides from our senses and that would be as easy for us to learn as they would be valuable if we possessed the scent of a poor bat. Perhaps (who can tell?) the horseshoe bat foresees with its nose the coming storm several days in advance; it may scent the future hurricane, smell the rain-clouds coming from the other end of the earth, know by detecting their odor what winds are about to blow, foretell in similar manner what the weather is going to be; and, guided by perceptions of which we can form no idea, it may make its plans for hunting insects that are sometimes abundant and sometimes scarce according to the state of the atmosphere.” “If the horseshoe bat’s nose can do all that,” said Jules, “we must agree that it is a first-rate sort of nose.”