SKETCH OF ALEXANDER WILSON. 407 



By persistent labor the successive volumes of the "Ornithol- 

 ogy " were issued up to the seventh, which appeared in the spring 

 of 1813. On the 6th of July in that year he wrote : " I am my- 

 self far from being in good health. Intense application to study 

 has hurt me much. My eighth volume is now in the press and 

 will be published in November. One volume more will complete 

 the whole." But he was not to see the appearance of even the 

 eighth volume. The unremitting labor of that summer, carried 

 on in the city, where even his tramps with his gun were cut off, so 

 reduced his strength that he succumbed to an attack of his old 

 enemy the dysentery and died, August 23, 1813, at the age of forty- 

 seven. The immediate cause of the attack was his swimming a 

 river in pursuit of a rare bird that he caught sight of while visit- 

 ing a friend. Wilson died unmarried, although in his letters he 

 condemns celibacy, and shows that he was not indifferent to female 

 companionship. In fact, he was to have married a Miss Miller, 

 whom he made one of his executors. George Ord, who had accom- 

 panied Wilson on some of his trips, was made a co-executor, and 

 completed the publication of the " Ornithology," prefixing to the 

 last volume a life of the author. The original edition of Wilson's 

 great work is now rare. It comprises nine thin folio volumes, about 

 eleven by fourteen inches in size. Several birds are figured on 

 each plate the smallest ones of life-size, the others reduced. An 

 edition in three volumes, including the birds afterward described 

 by Prince Bonaparte, was issued in 1829-'36,* and another in four 

 volumes,, edited by Prof. Robert Jameson, in 1831. 



Wilson was no compiler ; he took his facts from his own obser- 

 vations, or the accounts of those who had known the birds for a 

 lifetime. He had, further, as Grosart says, a " magnetical sympa- 

 thy with the birds whereby his descriptions of their looks and 

 ways and faculties take the coloring of so many little biographies 

 of personal friends." 



Sir William Jardine says of Wilson : " He was the first who 

 truly studied the birds of North America in their natural abodes, 

 and from real observations; and his work will ever remain an 

 ever-to-be-admired testimony of enthusiasm and perseverance 

 one certainly unrivaled in descriptions ; and if some plates and 

 illustrations may vie with it in finer workmanship or pictorial 

 splendor, few, indeed, can rival it in fidelity and truth of deline- 

 ation." 



* " American Ornithology," by Alexander Wilson and Prince Charles Lucien Bona- 

 parte. Edited, with a Life of Wilson, by Sir William Jardine, Bart. 



