INTRODUOTION. xi

supplies of these birds ; and dealers from those countries have established themselves in some of the cities
of that part of the world for the like purpose. From Sta. Fé de Bogota alone many thousands of skins
are annually sent to London and Paris, and sold as ornaments for the drawing-room and for scientific
purposes. The Indians readily learn the art of skinning and preserving, and, as a certain amount of
emolument attends the collecting of these objects, they often traverse great distances for the purpose of
procuring them ; districts more than a hundred miles stretching away from each side of Bogota are strictly
searched; and hence it is that from these places alone we receive not less than seventy species of this
family of birds. In like manner the residents of many parts of Brazil employ their slaves in collecting,
skinning, and preserving them for the European market ; and many thousands are annually sent from Rio de
Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco. They also supply the inmates of the convents with many of the more
richly coloured species for the manufacture of artificial-feather flowers. How numerous, then, must these
birds be in their native wilds, and how wonderfully must they keep in check the peculiar kind of insect life
upon which they principally feed! doubtless, one of the objects for which they were designed. After
these few cursory remarks, I proceed to give a general history of the group, the range and distribution of the

species, and such additional information as I have acquired during the course of my labours.

‘“«'The first mention which is made of the Humming-Birds,” says M. Lesson, ‘in the narratives of the
adventurers who proceeded to America, not with the design of studying its natural productions, but for the
discovery of gold, dates from 1558, and is to be found in ‘Les Singularites de la France Antarctique ’
(Brazil) of André Thévet and Jean de Léry, companions of La Villegaignon, who attempted in 1555 to found
a French colony there; but these superficial accounts would not have unfolded their natural history, had not
the old naturalists who published their observations at the commencement of the seventeenth century taken
care to make them better known; and we find some good accounts of them in the voluminous compilation
of Nieremberg, in the collection of fragments from the great works of Hernandez or Fernandez, and in those
of Piso. Ximenez, Acosta, Gomara, Marcgrave, Garcilasso, and Dutertre often mention these birds, but their
remarks are so superficial that it would be of little use to quote them now. Towards the end of the same
century Sir Hans Sloane, Catesby, Edwards, Brown, Father Labat, Plumier, Louis Feuillée, and Rochefort
gave tolerably complete figures and descriptions of some of the species ; but it was not until the com-

mencement of the eighteenth century that we became better acquainted with their natural history.”

It will be seen that little was really known respecting the Humming-Birds even at the end of the career
of the great Linneus. From Captain Cook both Pennant and Linneeus became aware that a species was
found as far north as Nootka Sound, while every voyager to the eastern shores of North America brought
tidings of its representative in the Zochilus Colubris. Jamaica, St. Domingo, and the smaller islands of the
West Indies furnished a fair quota of species inhabiting those countries ; and correspondents were speedily
established by Sloane, Brown, Edwards, and Catesby in Hispaniola, Demerara, and Brazil. Throughout all
these regions the Humming-Birds, and indeed their other zoological productions, were then but partially,
and only partially, known. The great primeval forests of Brazil, the vast palm-covered districts of the
deltas of the Amazon and the Orinoco, the fertile flats and savannahs of Demerara, the luxuriant and
beautiful region of Xalapa (the realm of perpetual spring) and other parts of Mexico, were literally
untrodden ground by the ornithological collector. Up to this time the vast provinces of the New World
had only been skirted; all within was virgin land, wherein even the explorer had scarcely placed a foot,

and where the only human inbabitants were the wild children of nature—the Botacudos and other tribes of