. An introduction to the study of mammals living and extinct. Mammals. PHYLLOSTOMATID^ 677 â wrongly set down as blood-suckers and named accordingly; and it fell to the lot of Darwin to determine at least one of the blood- sucking species, the following being his account of the circumstances under which the discovery of the sanguivorous habits of Desmodus rufus was made: " The Vampire Bat is often the cause of much trouble by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is gener- ally not so much owing to the loss of blood as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwar
. An introduction to the study of mammals living and extinct. Mammals. PHYLLOSTOMATID^ 677 â wrongly set down as blood-suckers and named accordingly; and it fell to the lot of Darwin to determine at least one of the blood- sucking species, the following being his account of the circumstances under which the discovery of the sanguivorous habits of Desmodus rufus was made: " The Vampire Bat is often the cause of much trouble by biting the horses on their withers. The injury is gener- ally not so much owing to the loss of blood as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one was actually caught on a horse's back. We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chili, when my servant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and, fancying he could detect something, suddenly put his hand on the beast's withers and secured the ; These Bats present, in the extraordinary differentiation of the manducatory and digestive apparatus, a departure from the type of other members of the family unparalleled in any of the other orders â of Mammalia, standing apart from all other mammals as being fitted only for a diet of blood, and capable of sustaining life upon that alone. Travellers describe the wounds inflicted by the large sharp- edged incisors as similar to those caused by a razor when shaving: a portion of the skin being shaved off and a large number of severed capillary vessel^ thus exposed, from which a constant flow of blood is maintained. From this source the blood is drawn through the exceedingly narrow gulletâtoo narrow for anything solid to passâinto the intestine-like stomach, whence it is probably gradually drawn off during the slow process of digestion, while the animal, sated with food, is hanging in a state of torpidity from the roof of a cave or the inner s
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