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 bird-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 Epeira, gemmed with 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 



