THE TROPICAL REGIONS. 137 



He maintains a continual cry of hour ! hour ! until, witli head bent, 

 he plunges the dagger of his beak to the bottom of the flowers, 

 exhausting their sweets and the tiny insects among them ; all, 

 too, with a motion so rapid that nothing can be compared to it — a 

 sharp, choleric, extremely impatient motion, sometime"s transported by 

 fury — against what ? against a great bird, which he pursues and 

 hunts to the death; against an already rifled blossom, which he cannot 

 forgive for not having waited for him. He rends it, devastates it, 

 and scatters abroad its petals. 



Leaves, as we know, absorb the poisons in the atmosphere ; 

 flowers exhale them. These birds live upon flowers, upon these 

 pungent flowers, on their sharp and burning juices, in a word, on 

 poisons. From their acids they seem to derive their sharp cry 

 and the everlasting agitation of their angry movements. These 

 contribute, and perhaps much more directly than light, to enrich 

 them with those strange reflects which set one thinking of steel, 

 gold, precious stones, rather than of plumage or blossoms. 



The contrast between them and man is violent. The latter, 

 throughout these regions, perishes or decays. Europeans who, on 

 the borders of these forests, attempt the cultivation of the cacao 

 and other colonial products, quickly succumb. The natives languish, 

 enfeebled and attenuated. That part of earth where man sinks 

 nearest the level of the beast is the scene of triumph of the bird, 

 where his extraordinary pomp of attire, luxurious and superabundant, 

 has justly won for him the name of bird of paradise. 



It matters not ! Whatever their plumage, their hues, their 

 forms, this great winged populace, the conqueror and devoui-er of 

 insects, and, in its stronger species, the eager hunter of reptiles, sweeps 

 over all the land as man's pioneer, purifying and making ready his 

 abode. They swim intrepidly on this vast sea of death — this hissing, 

 croaking, crawling sea — on the terrible, miasmatic vapours, inhaling 

 and defying them. 



It is thus that the gi'eat sanitaiy work, the time-old combat of 



the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the 



9a 



