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 althaea 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 
