Notices of New Books, 



8431 



First, Is the pollen really a food of the humming bird ? Secondly, 

 Can it, in the precise language of Natural History, be properly called 

 " saccharine " ? Thirdly, What are the " other saccharine parts of 

 flowers," the " liquid honey " having been already carefully elimina 

 ted ? I leave these queries uij answered : let the reader take them 

 for what they are worth. 



To take any exception to Mr. Gould's conclusions that the food of 

 humming birds is very various, but that insects really do " constitute 

 their principal food " may seem somewhat captious, but certainly 

 drawing my conclusions from Mr. Gould's own observations, and 

 without travelling the least tittle beyond his own record, I should be 

 ready to conclude from the wonderful structure of their double tubular 

 tongue, so similar to that of a Papilio or Sphinx, from their known 

 preference for long tubular corollas, from their propensity to pierce 

 those corollas with instinctive certainty at the exact point where the 

 nectary is situated, and, finally, from the interesting fact here recorded 

 of the mode of feeding and kind of food so complacently taken in con- 

 finement : from all these I say I should be ready to conclude that 

 the liquid honey of flowers was the normal food of the humming bird. 

 But, then, how numerous the exceptions ! and here 1 will not take 

 shelter under the trite and really paradoxical adage that exceptions 

 prove the rule, but will grant at once that the exceptions are, for any- 

 thing I know to the contrary, as constant, as prevalent, and as clearly 

 established as the rule itself. But what is the teaching of these ex- 

 ceptions ? In the first place how very frequently do we find a phyto- 

 phagous bird, whether it be a fruit-feeder, as the whitethroat, a seed- 

 feeder, as the goldfinch, a corn-feeder, as the sparrow, or a feeder on 

 the wheat plumule, as the skylark certainly is in the autumn, seeming 

 to abandon its normal and natural food during the whole of the breeding 

 season, and spending its time and its energies in searching for caterpil- 

 lars to feed its young. Is not the humming bird thus employed when 

 she visits the wondrous web of the spider, and plucks the unsuspecting 

 geometrician from its centre, while her wings vibrate so swiftly as to 

 be invisible, and so gently that the delicate fabric is scarcely moved 

 by the artificial breeze ? And does she not carry away the minute 

 spiders thus captured to feed her young ones ? Certain it is that where 

 this habit was observed the spider-catchers were actually engaged in 

 rearing a brood of little ones. I would not, however, restrict the insect 

 food of the humming birds exclusively to spiders ; there is no reason 

 to doubt that they eat winged insects also. But taking this for 

 granted, and taking it also as exceptional, a similar exception exists 



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