How different are the gentle-looking fruit-eating bats of the Tropics, which seem to belong to quite a different branch of the family. Their fox-like and intelligent faces are a pleasure to look at, reminding one of the lemurs, and harmonising beautifully with their quiet peaceful life among the fig-trees, guavas, mango-trees, and plantains of the East. There they hang in dense masses from the tall silk-cotton trees till night comes on, and then take wing as soon as the sun is set, and hooking themselves by one thumb to the fruit-trees, hold the fruit in the other as they feed. [Illustration: Fig. 63. Fruit-bats[150] hanging from the ledges of a cave in the Mauritius.] Thus we have a wide range of habits in bats, from the insect-eaters to the blood-sucking vampires on one hand, and the gentle fruit-bats on the other. But one virtue the most bloodthirsty and the most gentle have in common, and that is maternal love. As soon as the little ones are born they cling to their mother’s breast, and she often folds over them the skin which covers her tail, so as to form a kind of pouch, so that wherever she flies they go with her, and are carefully tended and suckled by her till they can take up the chase for themselves. And now we have followed out the Rodents and Insectivora in their various lines. Both lowly groups, of simple structure and with comparatively feeble brains, they have chiefly escaped destruction from higher forms by means of their nocturnal and burrowing habits or arboreal lives, and the marvellous rapidity with which they breed, combined with their power of sleeping without food during the winter in all cold countries. Nevertheless, though they are often strangely alike in outward form, they differ in many remarkable respects. The insect-eaters now existing are chiefly a few straggling forms of a once widely-spread group; while the rodents, on the contrary, are still a very numerous and varied family, spread all over the earth, and boasting of such intelligent forms as the squirrel, the beaver, and the rat. But here their advantages appear to end, while the insectivora point onwards not only to the bats, the only flying milk-givers, but also through the colugo to the lemurs, and thus onwards to the monkeys. It may be, and indeed probably is true, that the colugo started off from some very early type, more nearly related to the pouch-bearers than the present insect-eaters are; while the monkeys, again, branched off long ago on another line quite separate from the modern lemurs. But if the tiny shrew wished, like many little people, to boast of distinguished connections, he might with justice suggest that somewhere among his primitive ancestors one would probably be found whose descendants had risen far higher in the world than himself. * * * * *