Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: This is sufficient to prove the prodigious dominating influence of this organ over the general structure of the animal. The majority of the bats live on insects. Their stomach is simple without thread or complication. The intestinal canal is short and of a diameter pretty equal throughout, and the caecum is entirely wanting. The teeth correspond with this arrangement. The incisives are lobular, the canines long and sharp, and the molars bristling with points. Some bats (the Roussettes), which live principally on fruits, vary a little in the conformation of the teeth and intestines, anil are also characterized by a lesser prolongation of the dermis: accordingly, it is with some difficulty that we concede to them the name of bats at all. The sharp teeth of most of them are the only weapons with which nature has provided them to attack, seize, nnd lacerate those insects which form their subsistence. For, catching them in their flight, they possess one facility which has not been very generally remarked. This consists in the largeness of their mouths. The opening of the lipc in the mammiferous animals (a general does not extend beyond the canine teeth. We would be almost inclined to assert that the upper lip followed the Jot of the intermaxillaries; that it was subordinate to them, and formed as it were their natural covering. In fact, the mouth is never large, and deeply cut, except in those animals which possess very long intermaxillaries; and on the other hand, is always extremely narrow where these bones are small. To this rule, however, the bats, at least those of them which are insectivorous, form a remarkable, and, we believe, a solitary exception. The commissure of their lips is prolonged considerably behind and corresponds with the last molar but one. Their cheek-po...
Synopsis
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.