[f. FLYING ppl. a. + FOX.] A family of fruit-eating bats (Pteropidæ) found only in the tropical regions of the East and in Australia.
1759. Hirst, in Duncombe’s Letters (1773), III. 95–6. They have heads like foxes, and like them too are covered with hair of a reddish hue; for which reason, they are generally called ‘flying foxes’: towards the evening great flocks of them fly over the valleys, and very much resemble crows in their slow regular flight.
1827. P. Cunningham, 2 Years N. S. Wales (1828), I. 294. Our flying fox is an immense bat, of such a horrific appearance, that no wonder one of Cook’s honest tars should take it for the devil, when encountering it in the woods,—and bound breathless back to the boat, incapable from terror of giving a more particular description of the brimstone brat he had come athwart hawse of, except its being ‘about the size of a one-gallon keg.’
1859. Tennent, Ceylon I. II. i. 135. The Roussette of Ceylon (the ‘Flying-Fox,’ as it is usually called by Europeans,) measures from three to four feet from point to point of its extended wings.
