EOPITHECUS VOLANS.
_The Flying Lemur_.

NATIVE NAME.--_Myook-hloung-pyan_, Burmese.

HABITAT.--Mergui; the Malayan Peninsula.

[Figure: _Galaeopithecus volans_.]

DESCRIPTION.--Fur olive brown, mottled with irregular whitish spots
and blotches; the pile is short, but exquisitely soft; head and brain
very small; tail long and prehensile. The membrane is continued from
each side of the neck to the fore feet; thence to the hind feet, again
to the tip of the tail. This animal is also nocturnal in its habits,
and very sluggish in its motions by day, at which time it usually
hangs from a branch suspended by its fore hands, its mottled back
assimilating closely with the rugged bark of the tree; it is
exclusively herbivorous, possessing a very voluminous stomach, and
long convoluted intestines. Wallace says of it, that its brain is
very small, and it possesses such tenacity of life that it is very
difficult to kill; he adds that it is said to have only one at a birth,
and one he shot had a very small blind naked little creature clinging
closely to its breast, which was quite bare and much wrinkled.
Raffles, however, gives two as the number produced at each birth.
Dr. Cantor says that in confinement plantains constitute the
favourite food, but deprived of liberty it soon dies. In its wild
state it "lives entirely on young fruits and leaves; those of the
cocoanut and _Bombax pentandrum_ are its favourite food, and it
commits great injury to the plantations of these."--_Horsfield's_
'Cat. Mam.' Regarding its powers of flight, Wallace, in his 'Travels
in the Malay Archipelago,' says: "I saw one of these animals run up
a tree in a rather open space, and then glide obliquely through the
air to another tree on which it alighted near its base, and
immediately began to ascend. I paced the distance from one tree to
the other, and found it to be seventy yards, and the amount of descent
not more than thirty-five or forty feet, or less than one in five.
This, I think, proves that the animal must have some power of guiding
itself through the air, otherwise in so long a distance it would have
little chance of alighting exactly upon the trunk."

There is a carefully prepared skeleton of this animal in the Indian
Museum in Calcutta.

ORDER CARNARIA.

CHEIROPTERA.

It may seem strange to many that such an insignificant, weird little
creature as a bat should rank so high in the animal kingdom as to
be but a few removes from ma