Humming- 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 bii*d-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- 

 like 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 glittering garment of 

 the humming-bird, like the silvery lace woven by 

 the Bpeira, gemmed w^ith 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 light 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 



