A flowery shrub is sometimes seen
surrounded by a cloud of humming-birds, all of one species, and each, of
course, in a different position. If someone would draw such a scene as
that, showing a different detail of colour in each bird, according to
its position, then some idea of the actual appearance of the bird might
be given to one who had never seen an example."
It is hardly to be expected that anyone will carry out the above
suggestion, and produce a monograph with pages ten or fifteen feet wide
by eighteen feet long, each one showing a cloud of humming-birds of one
species flitting about a flowery bush; but even in such a picture as
that would be, the birds, suspended on unlovely angular projections
instead of "hazy semicircles of indistinctness," and each with an
immovable fleck of brightness on the otherwise sombre plumage, would be
as unlike living humming-birds as anything in the older monographs.
Whether the glittering iridescent tints and singular ornaments for which
this family is famous result from the cumulative process of conscious or
voluntary sexual selection, as Darwin thought, or are merely the outcome
of a superabundant vitality, as Dr. A. R.. Wallace so strongly
maintains, is a question which science has not yet answered
satisfactorily. The tendency to or habit of varying in the direction of
rich colouring and beautiful or fantastic ornament, might, for all we
know to the contrary, have descended to humming-birds from some
diminutive, curiously-shaped, bright-tinted, flying reptile of arboreal
habits that lived in some far-off epoch in the world's history.
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