will eat indiscriminately all that is brought; snails, rats, kittens,
puppies, magpies, and any kind of carrion or offal.

The house-martins have eggs still, and squab-young. The last swift
I observed was about the twenty-first of August; it was a straggler.

Red-starts, fly-catchers, white-throats, and reguli non cristati, still
appear; but I have seen no black-caps lately.

I forgot to mention that I once saw, in Christ Church College
quadrangle in Oxford, on a very sunny warm morning, a house-
martin flying about, and settling on the parapet, so late as the
twentieth of November.

At present I know only two species of bats, the common vespertilio
murinus and the vespertilio auritus.

I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would
take flies out of a person's hand. If you gave it anything to eat, it
brought its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its
head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. The adroitness
it showed in shearing off the wings of the flies, which were always
rejected, was worthy of observation, and pleased me much. Insects
seem to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh
when offered: so that the notion that bats go down chimnies and
gnaw men's bacon, seems no improbable story. While I amused
myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several times
confute the vulgar opinion, that bats when down on a flat surface
cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great ease from the
floor. It ran, I observed, with more dispatch than I was aware of;