THE 



WILSON BULLETIN 



NO. 69. 



A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY 



VOL. XXI DECEMBER, 1909. NO. 4 



OLD SERIES VOL. XXI. NEW SERIES VOL. XVI. 



ALEXANDER WILSON. 



VIL Biographies, Portraits and a Bibliography of the 



Various Editions of His Works. 



jiY frank l. burns. 



The reluctant conviction that a complete and unbiased biog- 

 raphy of Alexander Wilson will in all probability never be 

 written, has inspired the present series of papers. A com- 

 bination of circumstances, of which his early demise, the daz- 

 zling lustre of his successor's artistic genius, the apparent dif- 

 ficulty of interpreting his diffident personality and the dearth 

 of material, are factors in a task at no time easy. 



The city of Philadelphia was not only the scene of Wilson's 

 labors, but at that time the literary center of the country, and 

 its libraries are peculiarly rich in the material of the period, 

 some of which perhaps, I have the pleasure of rescuing from 

 oblivion. If it is at all possible for a man to be sd, Wilson 

 was emphatically and absolutely self-made ! While he did 

 not discover his true vocation until within the last ten years 

 of his life and the work, in which must rest his claim to dis- 

 tinction, was crowded in those few years, yet no other ornith- 

 ologist in America has accomplished anything approaching 

 it in so brief a time. Tracking almost everything at the be- 

 ginning but determination, he brought the undertaking to a 

 successful issue. Audubon's labors, with almost all the acces- 



