204 The Naturalist in La Plata.
partridge of the pampas (Nothura maculosa). When captured, after a few violent struggles to escape, it drops its head, gasps two or three times, and to all appearances dies. If, when you have seen this, you release your hold, the eyes open instantly, and, with startling suddenness and a noise of wings, it is up and away, and beyond your reach for ever. Possibly, while your grasp is on the bird it does actually become insensible, though its recovery from that condition is almost instantaneous. Birds when captured do sometimes die in the hand, purely from terror. The tinamou is excessively timid, and sometimes when birds of this species are chased--for gaucho boys frequently run them down on horseback--and when they find no burrows or thickets to escape into, they actually drop down dead on the plain. Probably, when they feign death in their captor's hand, they are in reality very near to death.
CHAPTER XVI.
HUMMING-BIRDS.
HUMMING-BIRDS are perhaps the very loveliest things in nature, and many celebrated writers have exhausted their descriptive powers in vain efforts to picture them to the imagination. The temptation was certainly great, after describing the rich setting of tropical foliage and flower, to speak at length of the wonderful gem contained within it; but they would in this case have been wise to imitate that modest novel-writer who introduced a blank space on the page where the description of his matchless heroine should have appeared. After all that has been written, the first sight of a living humming-bird, so unlike in its beauty all other beautiful things, comes like a revelation to the mind. To give any true conception of it by means of mere word-painting is not more impossible than it would be to bottle up a supply of the "living sunbeams" themselves, and convey them across the Atlantic to scatter them in a sparkling shower over the face of England.
Doubtless many who have never seen them in a state of nature imagine that a tolerably correct idea of their appearance can be gained from Gould's colossal monograph. The pictures there, however, only represent dead humming-birds. A dead robin
206 The Naturalist in La Plata.
is, for purposes of bird-portraiture, as good as a live robin; the same may be said of even many brilliant-plumaged species less aerial in their habits than humming-birds. In butterflies the whole beauty is seldom seen until the insect is dead, or, at any rate, captive. It was not when Wallace saw the Ornithoptera croesus flying about, but only when he held it in his hands, and opened its glorious wings, that the sight of its beauty overcame him so powerfully. The special kind of beauty which makes the first sight of a humming-bird a revelation depends on the swift singular motions as much as on the intense gem-like and metallic brilliancy of the plumage.