40 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHTT^GTOX. 



that the author, a schoolmaster near Philadelphia, decided upon 

 his plan. In a letter to Lawson he wrote : 



" I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a 

 Collection of all the Birds of North America. Now, I don't 

 want vou to throw cold water on this notice, Qiiixotic as it may 

 appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of Airy 

 Castles and brain Windmills that it has become one of my com- 

 forts of life, a sort of rough Bone, that amuses me when sated 

 w'ith the dull drudgery of Life." 



I need not eulogize Wilson. Every one knows how well he 

 succeeded. He has had learned commentators and elo- 

 quent biographers. Our children pore over the narrative of 

 the adventurous life of the weaver naturalist, and we all are 

 sensible of the charms which his graceful pen has given to the 

 life-histories of the birds. 



His poetical productions are immortal, and his lines to the 

 Blue Bird and the Fisherman's Hymn are worthy to stand by 

 the side of Bryant's Waterfowl, Trowbridge's Wood Pewee, 

 Emerson's Titmouse, Thaxter's Sandpiper, and, possibly best 

 of all. Walt. Whitman's Mocking-Bird in •' Out of the Cradle 

 endlessly Rocking." 



Ichthyology in America dates also from these last years of 

 the century. Garden was our only resident ichthyologist until 

 Peck and Mitchill began their work, but Schoepf, the Hessian 

 military surgeon, printed a paper on the Fishes of New York 

 in 1787, and William Bryant, of New Jersey, and Henry Col- 

 lins Flagg, of South Carolina, made observations upon the elec- 

 tric eel, in addition to those w^hich Williamson, of North Car- 

 olina, laid before the Royal Society in 1775- 



Paleontology had its beginning at about the same time in the 

 publication of Jefferson's paper on the Megalonyx or "Great 

 Claw " in 1797.* 



* The first vertebrate fossils were found in Virginia. Samuel Maverick, 

 of Massachusetts, reported to the colony at Boston in 1836 that, at a place 



