44 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 
Standing there by that silent lake, the morning mist 
enshrouding me, that strange bird in my hand, I fell 
at once into a train of musing suggested by the thought 
that this might prove a species new to the world. There 
is something in such a thought inexpressibly thrilling : 
to feel that to you alone has been vouchsafed the first 
glance at a being that has existed for ages undiscov- 
ered and unknown; has lived and breathed and sung, 
generation after generation of the same type; and that 
you, who now hold its breathless form in your hand, 
are the first to look upon it! At this age of the world, 
when man has searched the remotest confines of the 
globe, to find an animal so high in the scale as this — 
that has heart and lungs, and in whose veins the 
blood courses warm and red —is considered an event 
worthy of chronicling in annals that endure forfmore 
than a single generation. 
Like these were my reflections that morning, — 
meditations that caused me to ignore the superstition 
of my ignorant friend, whose uneasiness regarding | 
the lives of those whom he considered I had placed 
in jeopardy, was not soon allayed. 
Four species of humming-birds greeted me in my 
first camp in the tropics. They fairly lit up the val- 
ley with their gleaming ceats; not a bush or tree in 
flower that did not have one or more hovering above: 
it from morning till night. 
Until the New World was discovered, the humming- 
bird was not known to Europe. Though roaming from 
the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic, it is ever American, 
and never extends its migrations beyond the limits of » 
the Western continents. Of all the creations of bird-life 
