There is not, throughout the very ample range of the creation which the feathered tribes present to our consideration, a race of beings more deservedly admired for their beauty than the Humming-Birds. Natives of the warmer climates of the globe: of countries where the fervour of a tropic sun calls forth the spontaneous productions of the earth bedecked in gaiety unexampled in other regions of the earth, these little beings seem to participate in all its genial influence. With forms the most pleasing for symmetry and elegance they combine a brilliancy of colours the most splendid; their golden hues, their sapphirine tints, the lustre of the emerald, the ruby, garnet, amethyst, and topaz, with which their plumage is adorned, is not surpassed in brightness by the valued gems whose hues they borrow, and whose splendours emulate; as though, in this much-favoured race we beheld the richest gems of earth inspired with life, and endowed with powers of activity and will. The flowers whose nectareous juices afford them sustenance, are moreover the liveliest and most luxuriant among those that adorn the surface of the teeming earth:—in a word, the Humming-Birds, poised and fluttering upon the wing, or flitting from flower to flower, in search of food beneath the fervid illumination of a cloudless tropic sun, present a spectacle of the works of nature upon a scale of miniature the most pleasing and most brilliant. Owing to the slender structure of the bill, the Humming-Birds have some difficulty in obtaining their support; the luxuriant fruits of the tropic world afford them no repast: their bills are much too feeble to penetrate their rind to derive subsistence from their fluids. It is the rich juices of the flowers and not the fruits that afford them food; the fluids which they find secreted in the nectaria of flowers, the nectaria of those plants in particular which have the flowers long and tubular, and in which those repositories of mellifluous fluid lie in the bottom of the corolla are the favourite objects of their resort. About the flowers of this kind the Humming-Birds are seen hovering like bees, and like those industrious creatures extracting at the same time those juices of the flowers by means of their elongated tongue. The construction of the tongue in this tribe of birds is singular and deserving of explicit mention; it consists of two tubular filiform threads, which coalesce throughout their whole length, excepting at the tips, where they are divided, or bifid; this organ, which is remarkable for its extreme length, it inserts deeply down into the corolla of the flowers, and is thus enabled to obtain the nectar nearly in the same manner as the insects of the sphinx genus. The Humming-Birds, when on the wing, are observed to emit a humming noise, like that of the bee, and it is apparently from this circumstance that this class of the feathered race have derived the appellation of Humming-Birds.