Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
from skins preserved in a mutilated state by the natives. I knew how few Europeans had
ever beheld the perfect little organism I now gazed upon, and how very imperfectly it was
still known in Europe. The emotions excited in the minds of a naturalist, who has long de-
sired to see the actual thing which he has hitherto known only by description, drawing, or
badly-preserved external covering—especially when that thing is of surpassing rarity and
beauty, require the poetic faculty fully to express them. The remote island in which I found
myself situated, in an almost unvisited sea, far from the tracks of merchant fleets and navies;
the wild luxuriant tropical forest, which stretched far away on every side; the rude uncul-
tured savages who gathered round me,—all had their influence in determining the emotions
with which I gazed upon this 'thing of beauty.' I thought of the long ages of the past, during
which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year
being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye
to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas
excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures
should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions,
doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civil-
ized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into
the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-bal-
anced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the
extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to
appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were
not
made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone
on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man's intellectual
development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for
existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their
own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetu-
ation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connec-
ted.
After the first king-bird was obtained, I went with my men into the forest, and we were
not only rewarded with another in equally perfect plumage, but I was enabled to see a little
of the habits of both it and the larger species. It frequents the lower trees of the less dense
forests, and is very active, flying strongly with a whirring sound, and continually hopping or
flying from branch to branch. It eats hard stone-bearing fruits as large as a gooseberry, and
often flutters its wings after the manner of the South American manakins, at which time it
