JOURNAL OF MAINE ORNITHOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 3 



ist, being then in his twenty-ninth year, and one of the older men 

 upon the expedition, if we except Dr. Holmes and old Dean Murch. 

 He did not go because he thought he knew much natural history, 

 but because he hoped to learn something, particularly the art of 

 taxidermy. Dr. Kzekiel Holmes, editor of the Maine Farmer^ was 

 naturalist and head of the survey. He was a man of ability, but it 

 would be no libel to say that he knew nothing about ornithology ; 

 and about taxidermy he knew considerably less. He could not skin 

 a bird himself, nor tell anyone else how to do it, and had he not 

 been thoughtful enough to provide the expedition with a little pam- 

 phlet published by the Smithsonian Museum, not a bird could 

 have been preserved on the cruise. The chief part of the taxidermal 

 outfit of the survey consisted of a large coil of unannealed wire 

 about the size of hay wire. The Doctor planned to bring back all, 

 his trophies mounted, and for all of them the same wire was pro- 

 vided, Eagles and Hummingbirds to be treated impartially. The 

 rest of the naturalist's equipment was cotton batting and arsenic. 

 My father hunted assiduously for birds while the other men were 

 resting and eating, and as the survey was short-handed and the 

 water low, he abandoned his right to go as passenger and worked 

 as hard paddling and poling a canoe as any of the boatmen, besides 

 doing all the naturalist's work except writing the final report. The 

 results were not of great importance, and when the great Portland 

 fire burned up his collection of bird skins, I think he felt no regret 

 over the loss. 



"Having gone on a State Scientific Survey to learn about birds, 

 and having found that there was nothing there to be learned, my 

 father's scientific aspirations were nipped by a severe frost. It was 

 many years before he made another attempt to study birds. Rarely 

 he had one mounted. In my childhood a great Horned Owl, a little 

 Acadian Owl and a pair of Goshawks, killed by his own rifle, were 

 all the mounted birds he had. About 1K74 he began to buy a few 

 birds of plumage and had one small case of them to look at evenings 

 when he could not read. It was not until 1877, when he was forty- 

 five years old, that he made his first attempt at mounting a bird. 



