ORNITHOLOGY. 



hues they borrow, and whose splendours emulate ; as though, in this 

 much-favoured race we beheld the richest gems of earth inspired 

 with life, and endowed with powers of activity and will. The 

 flowers whose nectareous juices afford them sustenance, are more- 

 over the liveliest and most luxuriant among those that adorn the 

 surface of the teeming earth : — in a word, the Humming-Birds, 

 poised and fluttering upon the wing, or flitting from flower to flower, 

 in search of food beneath the fervid illumination of a cloudless tro- 

 pic sun, present a spectacle of the works of nature upon a scale of 

 miniature the most pleasing and most brilliant. 



Owing to the slender structure of the bill, the Humming-Birds 

 have some difficulty in obtaining their support ; the luxuriant fruits 

 of the tropic world afford them no repast : their bills are much too 

 feeble to penetrate their rind to derive subsistence from their fluids. 

 It is the rich juices of the flowers and not the fruits that afibrd them 

 food ; the fluids which they find secreted in the nectaria of flowers, 

 the nectaria of those plants in particular which have the flowers long 

 and tubular, and in which those repositories of mellifluous fluid lie 

 in the bottom of the corolla are the favourite objects of their resort. 

 About the flowers of this kind the Humming-Birds are s6en hover- 

 ing like bees, and like those industrious creatures extracting at the 

 same time those juices of the flowers by means of their elongated 

 tongue. The construction of the tongue in this tribe of birds is 

 singular and deserving of explicit mention ; it consists of two tubular 

 filiform threads, which coalesce throughout their whole length, ex- 

 cepting at the tips, where they are divided, or bifid ; this organ, 

 which is remarkable for its extreme length, it inserts deeply down 

 into the corolla of the flowers, and is thus enabled to obtain the 



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