I INADVERTENTLY wrote the name of Belt while quoting from the work of Bates. The answer to the question which your correspondents ask is sufficiently simple, and has, in fact, been furnished by one of them, viz., that while the vampire bat itself does not suck blood, the name is popularly extended to other kinds of bats which do. These other kinds—or at any rate some of them—belong indeed to the same sub-family as the vampire (viz., genera Phyllostoma and Desmodus); but that the large and repulsive-looking vampire is innocent of the habit in question may briefly be made evident by citing again, and a little more fully, the authority of Mr. Bates, who writes: “The vampire was here by far the most abundant of the family of leaf-nosed bats.... No wonder that imaginative people have inferred diabolical instincts on the part of so ugly an animal. The vampire, however, is the most harmless of bats, and its inoffensive character is well known to residents on the banks of the Amazons”(“Naturalist on the Amazon,” p. 337). Again, Mr. G. E. Dobson writes: “This species (Vampirus spectrum), believed by the older naturalists to be thoroughly sanguivorous in its habits, and named accordingly by Geoffroy, has been shown by the observations of modern travellers to be mainly frugivorous, and is considered by the inhabitants of the countries in which it is found perfectly harmless” (“Catalogue of the Chiroptera, &c.” p. 471).