The Victorians were - quite literally and without the least exaggeration - absolutely besotted with hummingbirds.  Not only did the number of known species proliferate over the nineteenth century - from 18 in 1758 to over a hundred in 1829 - but each new discovery seemed to shimmer more brightly with all the colours of the rainbow or was even smaller or more perfectly formed than all that had been seen in England before.  "There is not, it may safely be asserted, in all the varied works of nature in her zoological productions," William Bullock wrote about hummingbirds in 1824, "any family that can bear a comparison, for singularity of form, splendour of colour, or number and variety of species, with this the smallest of the feathered creation."

A case of nineteenth-century hummingbirds in the Natural History Museum, London.

Hummingbirds were frequently arranged on branches and displayed in visually intoxicating hoards like the image above, believed to have been created by Bullock in the mid-nineteenth century.  As Judith Pascoe notes, the diminutive size of hummingbirds and their appeal as bijouterie "increased the enthusiasm for and the ease of creating these kinds of conglomerations."  Hoarding accentuated the shimmer and vibrancy of the plumage and created a sort visual ecstasy for those not lucky enough to see the birds alive in the indigenous habitats.

Like Bullock, John Gould was also impassioned with the tiny birds, which he described as a "family of living gems." During his life he had amassed a collection of 1,500 mounted birds and 3,800 unmounted specimens and his five-volume Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of the Humming-birds, which he began in 1849 is considered by many to be his greatest achievement.  "That our enthusiasm and excitement with regard to most things become lessened, if not deadened, by time, particularly when he have acquired what we vainly consider a complete knowledge of the subject, is, I fear, too often the case with most of us," Gould wrote, "not so, however, I believe, with those who take up the study of the family of Humming Birds. Certainly I can affirm that such is not the case with myself; for the pleasure which I experience on seeing a Humming Bird is as great at the present moment as when I first say one.  During the first 20 years of my acquaintance with these wonderful works of creation my thoughts were often directed to them in the day, and my night dreams have not unfrequently carried me to their native forests in the distant country of America.”