FLYING FOX, or more correctly Fox Bat, a name applied to a family of fruit-eating bats (Pteropidae), found only in the Eastern hemisphere, and there confined to the tropical regions and Australia. It comprises 9 genera and 65 species, a considerable proportion of which occur in the islands of the Malay Archipelago. They are also found throughout Africa, and extend northward and eastward to China and Japan, and southward to Tasmania. They are likewise included among the few indigenous mammals of the South Sea Islands, being found in Samoa and the Marianne Islands. The flying foxes are the largest of the bats, the kalong of Java (Pteropus edulis) measuring nearly a foot and a half in length, and having an expanse of wing-mem brane measuring nearly five feet across. The flesh of this species is esteemed a delicacy in many parts of Malaya; but its use in this respect by no means compensates for the enormous amount of fruit which it destroys. The flying foxes are gregarious, nocturnal animals, suspending themselves during the day head downwards by thousands from the branches of trees, where with their wings gathered about them, they bear some resemblance to huge shrivelled-up leaves, or to clusters of some peculiar fruit. In Batchian, according to Wallace, they suspend themselves chiefly from the branches of dead trees, where they are easily caught or knocked down by sticks, the natives carrying them home in basketfuls. They are then cooked with abundance of spices, and “are really very good eating, something liko hare.” Towards evening these bats bestir themselves, and fly off in companies to the village plantations, where they feed on all kinds of fruit, and so numerous and voracious are they, that no garden crop has much chance of being gathered which is not specially ...