BIRDS 133 



popular magazine. 1 Although the magazine in question had 

 just incurred some ridicule and discredit from the proof that 

 the sensational contributions of De Eougemont were not as 

 veracious as the author declared them to be, there can be no 

 reason for doubting the accuracy of the observations in the 

 article to which I refer. The authoress simply described how 

 she watched a female humming-bird and her nest while the 

 bird hatched and brought up her two young ones. The obser- 

 vations were made in the island of Dominica, the species of 

 the humming-bird is not mentioned. It is expressly stated 

 that the males take no part in building the nest, sitting on 

 the eggs, or obtaining food for the young, but " fly away to the 

 mountains and spend their time in sucking nectar from the 

 wild -flowers and dancing about in the sweet sunshine." 

 Fighting, sporting, and love-making are therefore doubtless 

 the chief occupations of male humming-birds, and thus, as 

 in the case of the Pheasant or Pea-fowl, the dimorphism in 

 plumage corresponds to dimorphism in habits. The male 

 has specially developed feathers, because in his habitual 

 gestures the growth of those feathers is stimulated, while 

 in the female no such stimulation takes place. 



Darwin mentions, on the authority of Mr. Gould, that in 

 one species of humming-bird, Aethurus polytmus, in which the 

 male is distinguished both by vivid colours and two immensely 

 elongated tail feathers, these characters begin to appear in 

 the young bird from the first. He explains this and other 

 similar cases on the hypothesis that the males have trans- 

 mitted their peculiarities to their male offspring at an earlier 

 age than that at which they were first acquired. With this 

 explanation I fully agree, if it be true that the habits of the 

 male bird to which the peculiarities correspond are limited to 

 a later period of life. But it is possible that the habits also 



1 "Among the Humming-birds with a Camera," by Elizabeth Grinnell, 

 Wide World Magazine, March 1898. 



