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 
