The almost simultaneous isolation in 1953 of the rabies virus from insectivorous bats in Flordia (Venters, Hoffert, Scatterday and Hardy, '54) and in Texas (Sullivan, Grimes, Eads, Menzies and Irons, '54; Burns and Farinacci, '55) together with the occurrence of at least two human rabies deaths believed to have resulted from exposure to bats in this country (Sulkin and Greve, '54; Irons, Eads, Grimes and Conklin, '57), stimulated studies to evaluate the significance of these animals in the ecology of rabies in the United States. During the course of studies to determine the mechanism by which these animals may serve as persisting reservoirs for the rabies virus in nature it was observed by us (Sulkin, Krutzsch, Wallis and Allen, '57) that the interscapular brown fat provides a depot for storage for the virus.
The observation by Wimsatt ('55) that a large lobe of the parotid gland in the fruit eating bat Artibeus jamaicewsis (family Phyllostomatidae) extends into the interscapular space to be intimately associated with the brown fat, together with the classic role played by the salivary glands in rabies infection, stimulated us to investigate the morphological relationship of the interscapular brown fat and parotid glands in the species of bats used in our experiments.