be said about them? Many
of them have been written about for a century, yet how little
knowledge has been gained! It has been no small labour to collate
all the foregoing species, and to compare them with various works;
it would have been a most difficult task but for the assistance I
have received from Dr. Dobson's book, which every naturalist should
possess if he desires to have a thorough record of all the Indian
Chiroptera.

INSECTIVORA.

These are mostly small animals of, with few exceptions, nocturnal
habits.

Their chief characteristic lies in their pointed dentition, which
enable them to pierce and crush the hard-shelled insects on which
they feed. The skull is elongated, the bones of the face and jaw
especially, and those of the latter are comparatively weak. Before
we come to the teeth we may notice some other peculiarities of this
order.

The limbs are short, feet five-toed and plantigrade, with the entire
sole placed on the ground in running, and these animals are all
possessed of clavicles which in the next order are but rudimentary;
in this respect they legitimately follow the Bats. The mammae are
placed under the abdomen, and are more than two. None of them (except
_Tupaia_) have a caecum (this genus has been most exhaustively
described in all its osteological details by Dr. J. Anderson: see
his 'Anatomical and Zoological Researches'); the snout is usually
prolonged and mobile. The dentition is eccentric, and not always easy
to determine; some have long incisors in front, followed by other
incisors along the sides of their narrow jaws and canines, all
shorter than the molars; others have large separated canines,
between which are placed small incisors. In Blyth's additions to
Cuvier he states that "in this group we are led to identify the canine
tooth as simply the first of the false molars, which in some has two
fangs, and, as in the Lemurs, to perceive that the second in the lower
jaw is in some more analogous in size and character to an ordinary
canine than that which follows the incisors. The incisor teeth are
never more than six in number, which is the maximum throughout
_placental_ mammalia (as opposed by _marsupial_), and in several
instances one or two pairs are deficient. (It should be remarked that
a single tooth with two fangs is often represented by two separate
teeth, each with one fang.) The canines, with the succeeding false
molars, are extremely variable, but there are ordinarily