510 Mr. G. E. Lodge on some 



The female is similar in colour, but not so bright, neither is 

 the black part of her plumage so deep and glossy. The steely 

 blue, with a faint tinge of green, of the tail-coverts is quite a 

 peculiar colour, and Gould has missed it in his plate of this 

 species ; he has made it much too green. I never saw this bird 

 over water. It seemed to like any sort of locality so long as 

 there were plenty of bananas about. I set up some of these 

 birds at the time (as well as other Humming-birds I obtained) 

 as nearly as I could in the positions I saw them in when 

 alive, mounting them on the Waterton principle, without 

 wires. In skinning Humming-birds one is much struck 

 by the great toughness of the skin, which is a great help, and 

 compensates for the difficulty of manipulation of such small 

 subjects. The muscles on their little carcasses, too, are as 

 hard as wood. Luckily their heads are small, and there is 

 no difficulty in skinning them back to the beak to get at the 

 skull to clean it. The tongue is, to a great extent, on the 

 Woodpecker principle, but is cleft towards the tip, each 

 bifurcation being clothed with minute bristles on the outside 

 edge. The sternum is prolonged back so far that it reaches 

 almost to the end of the vertebrse, covering all the ab- 

 dominal part of the system. Humerus, radius and ulna 

 are very short. 

 '\ Eulampis holosericeus was also common in Dominica, but 

 rather less so than E.juffularis ; but I found this to be a shier 

 bird ; it very soon got frightened at being disturbed, when it 

 was useless attempting to get close enough to shoot it (my 

 shooting-range usually being from 10 to 20 feet). Its very 

 position when at rest denotes its shy nature. Instead of 

 sitting quietly with its head drawn back into its shoulders, 

 it seemed always to be on the alert, with feathers close to 

 its body and neck stretched out, looking about in all direc- 

 tions and ready to dash away on the too close approach of 

 the spectator. It often feeds among herbage close to the 

 ground, which I never saw E. jugularis do, and seemed espe- 

 cially fond of a plant that grew about 18 inches in height, with 

 globular honeycombed seed-heads, not very unlike our 

 horehound. This plant was always infested M'ith small 

 insects. I found E. holosericeus at a good elevation, but not 



