human accomplices would be likely to
peach.

The bat is a chimera, a monstrous and impossible
being, symbolising nothing but chimeras;
a goblin of the night, exclusively
representing the phantoms of a sick imagination;
the offspring of brains calcined by
ascetism, fasting, and solitary meditations.
The bat is imposture made beast, as M. de
Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, was lies made
man. The character of universal anomaly
and of monstrosity which is observed in the
conformation of the bat, those strange interversions
of the senses, which enable the ugly
brute to hear with its nose and to see with its
ears, are explained by the subversion of ideas,
by the intellectual disorders, which this fantastic
type is commissioned to symbolise. The
bat, moreover, ingenuously avows its complicity
in the work of obscurantism. For sixty
centuries it has been the most devoted
auxiliary of superstition, for the simple reason
that its natural sympathies are with the
friends of darkness, that sunshine dazzles it,
and that it cannot see a lighted candle without
feeling the desire to blow it out. It
would be impossible to charge the poor beast
with these sympathies as a crime. Birds of
a feather flock together. The bat only drags
itself along by day; it neither flies nor
walks. Soldiers of this kind cannot serve in
the regiment of progress.

And besides; the fact is, that in excuse for
the systematic obscurantism of the bat, as for
that of the bear—who does not pretend to
be a bit too fond of light—there exists an
extenuating circumstance of very considerable
importance. All who are not aware of it
ought to be told that the infancy of worlds is
the reign of bats, as the infancy of man is
the heyday of bugbears and black old men.
The bat occupies in the scale of animality of
a world, a position which is proportionally
higher as that world happens to be nearer
in age to its first hatching of animal life.
Now, it was in high prosperity in the world
which preceded this. Antediluvian history
even records that it was one of the most
finished types of animal life then existing.
The bat still retains one remnant of the
distinguished rank which it occupied in those
remote times; namely, its teats are situated
in the same part of its person as in the
sphynx. It seems, then, that in the good old
times of creation, number two (the one before
the last), the domains of air indisputably
belonged to two or three gigantic bats—a
sort of aerial ships whose membranous sails
measured ten or a dozen yards from tip to
tip. These model bats—which learned men
call ptérodactyles to avoid repeating the word
cheiroptère, but which means exactly the very
same thing—these bats shared with the bear
the enjoyment of an absolute tyranny. I
have heard that these fur-birds, these hideous
vampires, made nothing of tapping a poor
megatherium or dinotherium, when he was
lying fast asleep, and drawing from him a
trifle of fifty quarts of blood.

Without being the apologist either of
tyrants or of vampires, one can feel a little
indulgence for fallen greatness. It would
be too much to require that those who have
lost their all by a revolution, should be
violently in love with the new order of things.
In every age, and on every planet, pretenders,
that is to say the fallen—the bear and the
bat—have joined hands with obscurants, or
in plain words, with jesuits. But, exactly as
the first rays of the sun, the centre of light
and love, chase from the revivified atmosphere
the spirits of darkness, the owl and
the bat; so, false morality and superstition,
the idea of a malevolent God. all fear and all
imposture, will quit for ever the mind of
man with the first glimmer of the dawn of
harmony! The bat, which lost so much of
its importance at the last creation, is destined
to disappear completely at the opening of the
next creation, number four.

We have not yet done with M. Toussenel
and his strange anomalies.

DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY.

IT is natural that a Metropolis so gigantic
as the empress-city of Britain, should set the
fashion to its provincial kinsfolk. It is, I
believe, a fact not very much controverted,
that London habits, London manners and
modes, London notions and London names
are extensively copied, followed, and emulated
in the provinces. There is scarcely a village,
not to say a town in Great Britain where
some worthy tradesman has not baptised his
place of business London House, or the London
Repository; where he pretends to sell
London porter, London hosiery or London
cutlery. There are few towns that do not
number among their streets several whose
appellations are drawn from the street lists
of the London Post Office Directory. Regent
Streets, Bond Streets, St. James's Streets,
Pall Malls, Drury Lanes, Strands, Fleet
Streets, Ludgate Hills, Covent Gardens,
Cheapsides and Waterloo Places abound in
great profusion throughout the whole of the
United Kingdom. There is sometimes a ludicrous
incongruity between the appearance,
class, and species of street familiar in London,
and the synonymous street presented
in a country town. A man, for instance, is
apt to be puzzled when he finds a little
greasy cube of ill-favoured houses, resembling
a bar of soap just marked for cutting
into squares, figured down as Belgrave Place
or Wilton Crescent. He will not be quite prepared
to recognise Cheapside in a series of
basket-makers' cottages with small kitchen
gardens; nor will a dirty thoroughfare, principally
occupied by old-clothes-vendors and
marine-store-dealers, quite come up to his ideas
of Bond Street or Regent Street. Islington—
composed of a long avenue of merchants'