THE TROPICAL REGIONS. 137 
IIe maintains a continual cry of hour ! hour! until, with 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, sometimes 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 devourer 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 great sanitary work, the time-old combat of 
the bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the 
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