210 
The Animal-Lore of Shahspeare’s Time. 
our own, that the night-jar is injurious to cattle, and 
explains that what the bird really seeks as he wheels 
round the sleeping kine is not a milk, but an insect diet. 
Skelton probably refers to the night-jar in the follow¬ 
ing lines:— 
“ The wodhacke, that singeth churre, 
Horsly as hee had the murre.” 
(Philip jSparow .) 
That this bird was classed among the foreboders of 
evil will not surprise any one who has listened to the 
curious sound it utters, on still summer evenings, whilst 
itself hidden from view. 
“ Night-jars and ravens, with wide stretched throats, 
From yews and hollies send their baleful notes.” 
(Poole, English Parnassus.') 
With a somewhat abrupt transition we turn from 
Fumming- the hoarse-voiced night-jar of our own country, 
bird. with its gloomy associations of darkness 
and ill omen, to the glittering fragments of sunshine that 
enliven the forests of America. Joseph Acosta mentions 
the jewel-plumaged Humming-birds, the feathered fairies 
of the western world :— 
11 In Peru there are birds which they call tomineios , so small, that 
oftentimes I have doubted, seeing them flie, whether they were bees or 
butter-flies ; but in truth they are birds.” ( Purchas , vol. iii. p. 965.) 
Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo, in his description of 
these beautiful little creatures, pays them but a poor 
compliment w 7 hen he compares them to the fanciful 
representations of birds in the illuminated missals 
painted by cloistered artists. He writes 
“ There are found in the Firme Land [South America] certaine birds, 
so little that the whole bodie of one of them is no bigger then the top 
of the biggest finger of a mans hand, and yet is the bare body without 
feathers not halfe so bigge; this bird, beside her littlenesse, is of such 
velocitie and swiftnesse in flying, that whoso seeth her flying in the 
