H U M H U M 357 years (1803-1811) he held the appointment of orchestral conductor to Prince Eszterhazy, previously occupied by Haydn. It was not till 1816 that he again appeared in public as a pianist, his success being quite extraordinary. His gift of improvisation at the piano was especially admired, but his larger compositions also were highly appreciated, and for a time Hummel was considered one of the leading musicians of an age in which Beethoven was in the zenith of his power. In Prussia, which he visited in 1822, the ovations" offered to him were unprecedented, and other countries France in 1825 and 1829, Belgium in 1826, and England in 1830 and 1833 added further laurels to his crown. He died in 1837 at Weimar, where for a long time he had been the musical conductor of the court theatre. His compositions are very numerous, and comprise almost every branch of music. He wrote amongst other things several operas, both tragic and comic, and two grand masses (Op. 80 and 111). Infinitely more important are his compositions for the pianoforte (his two concert! in A minor and B minor, and the sonata in F sharp minor), and his chamber music (the celebrated septet, and several trios, &c.). His experience as a player and teacher of the pianoforte was embodied in his Great Pianoforte School (Vienna), and the excellence of his method is further proved by such pupils as Henselt and Ferdinand Hiller. Both as a composer and as a pianist Hummel continued the traditions of the earlier Viennese school of Mozart and Haydn ; his style in both capacities was marked by purity and correctness rather than by passion and imagination. In his compositions there is much that is now antiquated ; but to deny him all merit would be as uncritical as were his contemporaries in the opposite direction when they mentioned him in the same breath with Beethoven. HUMMING-BIRD, a name in use for more than two centuries, and possibly ever since English explorers first knew of the beautiful little animals to which, from the sound occasionally made by the rapid vibrations of their wings, it is applied. Among books that are ordinarily in natu ralists hands, the name seems to be first found in the Musceum Tradescantianum, published in 1656, but it therein occurs (p. 3) so as to suggest its having already been accepted and commonly understood ; and its earliest use, as yet discovered, is said to be by Thomas Morton in the New English Canaan, printed in 1632 a rare work reproduced by Peter Force in his Historical Tracts (vol. ii., Washington, 1838). Thevet, in his Singularitez cle la France antarctique (Antwerp, 1558, fol. 92), has been more than once cited as the earliest author to mention Humming-birds, which he did under the name of Gouambuch; but it is quite certain that Oviedo, whose Hystoria general de las Indias was published at Toledo in 1525, preceded him by more than thirty years, with an account of the " paxaro mosquito " of Hispaniola, of which island "the first chronicler of the Indies" was governor. 1 This name, though now apparently disused in Spanish, must have been current about that time, for we find Gesner in 1555 (De avittm natura, iii. p. 629) translating it literally into Latin as Passer muscatus, owing, as he says, his know ledge of the bird to Cardan, the celebrated mathematician, astrologer, and physician, from whom we learn (Comment. 1 In the edition of Oviedo s work, published at Salamanca in 1547, the earliest the present writer has been able to see, the account (lib. xiv. cap. 4) runs thus: " Ayassimismo enesta ysla vnos paxaricos tan negros conio vn terciopelo negro muy bueno & son tan pequenos que ningunos he yo visto en Indias menores/ excepto el que aca se llama paxaro mosquito. El qual es tan pequeno que el bulto del es menor harto o assaz que le cabeca del dedo pulgar de la mano. Este no le he visto enesta Ysla pero dizen me que aqui los ay : & por esso dexo de tiablar enel pak> dezir dode los he visto que esen la tierranrme quudo della se trate." A modern Spanish version of this passage will be found in the beautiful edition of Oviedo s works published by the Academy of Madrid in 1851 (i. p. 444). in Ptolem. de astr. judiciis, Basel, 1554, p. 472) that, on his return to Milan from professionally attending Arch bishop Hamilton at Edinburgh, he visited Gesner at Zurich, about the end of the year 1552. 2 The name still survives in the French Oiseau-mouche ; but the ordinary Spanish appellation is, and long has been, Tominejo, from tomin, signifying a weight equal to the third part of an adarme or drachm, and used metaphorically for anything very small. Humming-birds, however, are called by a variety of other names, many of them derived from American languages, such as Guainumbi, Ourissia, and Colibri, to say nothing of others bestowed upon them (chiefly from some peculiarity of habit) by Europeans, like Pica/lores, Chuparosa, and Froufrou. Barrere, in 1745, conceiving that Humming birds were allied to the Wren, the Trochilus, 3 in part, of Pliny, applied that name in a generic sense (Ornith. Spec, novum, pp. 47, 48) to both. Taking the hint thus afforded, Linnaeus very soon after went further, and, excluding the Wrens, founded his genus Trochilus for the reception of such Humming-birds as were known to him. The unfortunate act of the great nomenclator cannot be set aside; and, since his time, ornithologists with but few exceptions have followed his example, so that now-a-days Humming-birds are universally recognized as forming the Family Trochilidce. The relations of the Trockilidce to other birds were for a long while very imperfectly understood. Nitzsch first drew attention to their agreement in many essential charac ters with the Swifts, Cypselidce, and placed the two Families in one group, which he called Mac roc/tires, from the great length of their manual bones, or those forming the extremity of the wing. The name was perhaps not very happily chosen, for it is not the distal portion that is so much out of ordinary proportion to the size of the bird, but the proximal and median portions, that in both Families are curiously dwarfed. Still the marnis, in comparison with the other parts of the wing, is so long that the term Macro- chircs is not wholly inaccurate. The affinity of the Trocki lidce and Cypselidw, once pointed out, became obvious to every careful and unprejudiced investigator, and there are probably few systematists now living who refuse to admit its validity. More than this, it is confirmed by an examin ation of other osteological characters. The "lines," as a boat-builder would say, upon which the skeleton of each form is constructed are precisely similar, only that whereas the bill is very short and the head wide in the Swifts, in the Hummingbirds the head is narrow and the bill long the latter developed to an extraordinary degree in some of the Trochilidoc, rendering them the longest-billed birds known. 4 Professor Huxley considers these two Families,
- See also Prof. Morley s Life o/Girolamo Cardano (ii. pp. 152,153).
3 Under this name Pliny perpetuated (Hist. Naturalis, viii. 25) the confusion that had doubtless arisen before his time of two very distinct birds. As Sundevall remarks (Tentamen, p. 87, note), rpox Aos was evidently the name commonly given by the ancient Greeks to the smaller Plovers, and was not improperly applied by Herodotus (ii. 68) to the species that feeds in the open mouth of the Cro codilethe Phmanus cryyptius of modern ornithologists in which sense Aristotle (Hist. Animalium, ix. 6) also uses it. But the received text of Aristotle has two other passages (ix. 1 and 11) wherein the word appears in a wholly different connexion, and can there be only taken to mean the Wren the usual Greek name of which would seem to be t/pxiAos (Sundevall, Om Aristotl. Djurarter, No. 54). Though none of his editors or commentators have suggested the possibility of such a thing, one can hardly help suspecting that in these passages some early copyist has substituted rpox&os for opx^os, and so laid the foundation of a curious error. It may be here remarked that the Crocodile of St Domingo is said to have the like office done for it by some kind of bird, which is called by Descourtilz (Voyage, iii. p. 26), a " Todier," but, as Geoffr. St Hilaire observes (Descr. de VEyypte, ed. 2, xxiv. p. 440), is more probably a Plover. Unfortunately the fauna of Hispaniola is not much better known now than in Oviedo s days. 4 Thus Docimastcs ensifir, in which the bill is longer than both head
and body together.
