Iv 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 althza 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 
