HUMMING-BIRDS 317 



birds, quoting the descriptions of those modern naturalists 

 who have personally observed them. Their appearance, 

 remarks Professor Alfred Newton, is entirely unlike that of 

 any other bird : " One is admiring some brilliant and beauti- 

 ful flower, when between the blossom and one's eye suddenly 

 appears a small dark object, suspended as it were between four 

 short black threads meeting each other in a cross. For an 

 instant it shows in front of the flower ; again another instant, 

 and emitting a momentary flash of emerald and sapphire light, 

 it is vanishing, lessening in the distance, as it shoots away, to 

 a speck that the eye cannot take note of." Audubon observes 

 that the Ruby humming-birds pass through the air in long 

 undulations, but the smallness of their size precludes the pos- 

 sibility of following them with the eye farther than fifty or 

 sixty yards, without great difficulty. A person standing in a 

 garden by the side of a common althaea in bloom, will hear 

 the humming of their wings and see the little birds themselves 

 within a few feet of him one moment, while the next they 

 will be out of sight and hearing. Mr. Gould, who visited 

 North America in order to see living humming-birds while 

 preparing his great work on the family, remarks that the 

 action of the wings reminded him of a piece of machinery 

 acted upon by a powerful spring. When poised before a 

 flower, the motion is so rapid that a hazy semicircle of indis- 

 tinctness on each side of the bird is all that is perceptible. 

 Although many short intermissions of rest are taken, the bird 

 may be said to live in the air an element in which it per- 

 forms every kind of evolution with the utmost ease, frequently 

 rising perpendicularly, flying backward, pirouetting or dancing 

 off, as it were, from place to place, or from one part of a tree 

 to another, sometimes descending, at others ascending. It 

 often mounts up above the towering trees, and then shoots off 

 like a little meteor at a right angle. At other times it gently 

 buzzes away among the little flowers near the ground ; at one 

 moment it is poised over a diminutive weed, at the next it is 

 seen at a distance of forty yards, whither it has vanished with 

 the quickness of thought. 



The Rufous Flame - bearer, an exquisite species found 

 on the west coast of North America, is thus described by 

 Mr. Nuttall: "When engaged in collecting its accustomed 



