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. It is
not, at all events, maintained by anyone that _all_ birds sprang
originally from one reptilian stock; and the true position of
humming-birds in a natural classification has not yet been settled, for
no intermediate forms exist connecting them with any other group, To the
ordinary mind they appear utterly unlike all other feathered creatures,
and as much entitled to stand apart as, for instance, the pigeon and
ostrich families. It has been maintained by some writers that they are
anatomically related to the swifts, although the differences separating
the two families appear so great as almost to stagger belief in this
notion. Now, however, the very latest authority on this subject, Dr.
Schufeldt, has come to the conclusion that swifts are only greatly