Flummiung-Birds. 207 
yet it is precisely this formless cloud on which the 
glittering body hangs suspended, which contributes 
most to give the humming-bird its wonderful sprite- 
like or extra-natural appearance. How strange, 
then, to find bird-painters persisting in their efforts 
to show the humming-bird flying! When they 
draw it stiff and upright on its perch the picture is 
honest, if ugly; the more ambitious representation 
is a delusion and a mockery. 
Coming to the actual colouring—the changeful 
tints that glow with such intensity on the scale- 
lke feathers, it is curious to find that Gould seems 
to have thought that all difficulties here had been 
successfully overcome. The ‘“‘new process” he 
spoke so confidently about might no doubt be used 
with advantage in reproducing the coarser metallic 
reflections on a black plumage, such as we see in 
the corvine birds; but the glttering garment of 
the humming-bird, like the silvery lace woven by 
the Epeira, gemmed with dew and touched with 
rainbow-coloured light, has never been and never 
can be imitated by art. 
On this subject one of the latest observers of 
humming-birds, Mr. Everard im Thurn, in his work 
on British Guiana, has the following passage :— 
‘Hardly more than one point of colour is in 
reality ever visible in any one humming-bird at one 
and the same time, for each point only shows its 
peculiar and glittering colour when the hght falls 
upon it from a particular direction. A true repre- 
sentation of one of these birds would show it in 
somewhat sombre colours, except just at the one 
point which, when the bird is in the position chosen 
