hat it
was not turquoise, but beryl; and a few minutes later I was certain
that it was aquamarine; on my way home another glance showed the color
of forget-me-nots on its plumage, and as I looked at it on my table,
it was Nile green. Yet the feathers were painted in flat color,
without especial sheen or iridescence, and when I finally analyzed it,
I found it to be a delicate calamine blue. It actually had the
appearance of a too strong color, as when a glistening surface
reflects the sun. From beak to tail it threw off this glowing hue,
except for its chin and throat, which were a limpid amaranth purple;
and the effect on the excited rods and cones in one's eyes was like
the power of great music or some majestic passage in the Bible. You,
who think my similes are overdone, search out in the nearest museum
the dustiest of purple-throated cotingas,--_Cotinga cayana,_--and
then, instead, berate me for inadequacy.

Sheer color alone is powerful enough, but when heightened by contrast,
it becomes still more effective, and I seemed to have secured, with
two barrels, a cotinga and its shadow. The latter was also a
full-grown male cotinga, known to a few people in this world as the
dark-breasted mourner (_Lipaugus simplex_). In general shape and form
it was not unlike its cousin, but in color it was its shadow, its
silhouette. Not a feather upon head or body, wings or tail showed a
hint of warmth, only a dull uniform gray; an ash of a bird, living in
the same warm sunlight, wet by the same rain, feeding on much the same
food, and claiming relationship with a blazing-feathered turquoise.
There is some very exact and very absorbing reason for all this, and
for it I search with fervor, but with little success. But we may be
certain that the causes of this and of the host of other unreasonable
realities which fill the path of the evolutionist with never-quenched
enthusiasm, will extend far beyond the colors of two tropical birds.
They will have something to do with flowers and with bright
butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a
whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the
full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes
in comparison to what they might be.

Finally, there was thrown aside all finesse, all delicacy of
presentation, and the last lingering feeling of temperate life and
nature was erased. From now on there was no confusion of zones, no
conces