ZOOLOGY IN AMEEICA BEFORE THE PRESENT 

 PERIOD.* 



By H. V. Wilson. 



Zoology deals with the phenomena of animal life. A neces- 

 sary and usually early step in the progress of this science in 

 any quarter of the world is to discover and distinguish the 

 kinds of animals — the species, as we say — there found. 

 These in time become the objects of more and more intense and 

 analytical study. 



The earliest extant record of our fauna, as far as I know, 

 consists of a series of water-color sketches made by John White, 

 a member of the expedition which made the first settlement on 

 Roanoke Island (1585), and governor of the second Roanoke 

 Island colony. White's pictures, now preserved in the British 

 Museum, show a number of our birds, fishes, insects, also plants 

 and the appearance of the native inhabitants. Even before this, 

 descriptions of some of our native forms, with specimens, had 

 reached learned Europeans interested in science. 



In the seventeenth century the French missionaries gave 

 further information of this kind, included in the accounts of 

 their travels. A few of the settlers, too, were sufficiently 

 informed to deal with such matters. Thus John Winthrop, son 

 of the first governor of Massachusetts, and himself governor of 

 Connecticut, was a regular correspondent of the Royal Society. 

 We owe an early record entitled "New England's Rarities" 

 (1672) to an English traveller, John Josselyn, who mentions a 

 good many of our vertebrates, some mollusks and Crustacea, 

 also some lower forms such as the star-fish and sea-nettle (jelly 

 fish). Another Englishman, John Lawson, in his History of 

 North Carolina (1714), mentions a number of our animals. 

 His remarks concerning them are often interesting. Buffaloes, 

 he says, he has known to be killed on the hilly part of the Cape 

 Fear river. Beavers were numerous in North Carolina at that 

 time, and whales were abundant off the coast. He lists under 



*Presidential address before the North Carolina Academy of Science, April 26, 1912. 



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