Page:Natural History, Birds.djvu/148

 sailing in the air, where all the functions of life were carried on, even to the production of their eggs and young. The dew and the vapours were said to be their only food, nor were they ever supposed to touch the earth till the moment of their death, never taking rest except by suspending themselves from the branches of trees by the shafts of the two elongated feathers which form a characteristic of this beautiful race. The various names applied to them kept up the delusion that originated in the craft of the inhabitants of the eastern countries where they are found; for the natives scarcely ever produced a skin in former times from which they had not carefully extirpated the feet. Nor was it only the extreme elegance and richness of their feathers that caused these birds to be sought as the plume for the turbans of oriental chiefs; for he who wore that plume, relying implicitly on the romantic accounts of the life and habits of the bird, and impressed with its sacred names, believed that he bore a charmed life, and that he should be invulnerable even where the fight raged most furiously."

The sober accounts of honest travellers, as Pigafetta, Bontius, and others, who described the birds from their own observation as having feet, and as feeding on small birds and large insects,—were rejected with contempt by closet naturalists, and they themselves were accused, in no measured terms, of falsehood. Even after specimens had been brought to Holland, with their feet attached, and after the enumeration in the published Catalogue of Tradescant's Museum in England, of "Birds of Paradise, or Manucodiata, whereof