Vol 'i9l9 XVI ] Harris, Notes on Harris's Sparrow. 185 



of assistance from that quarter, and was promised duplicates of 

 all the new species in his possession. It is said that five species 

 were here secured, but the Mourning Finch was not included. 

 Nuttall had reserved this discovery for his own book, and not only 

 was posterity thereby deprived of an Havell engraving of the 

 largest and handsomest of our Sparrows, but Audubon, being kept 

 in the dark, was himself to later publish the bird as the discovery 

 of his friend Edward Harris. 1 



On the same day that Townsend and Nuttall were so pictur- 

 esquely entering the Indian country, Maximilian, Prince of Wied, 

 who had spent the previous year on the upper Missouri, was making 

 his way down-stream on his return to civilization. On May 13, 

 1834, when but a few miles from the northern boundary of Missouri, 

 his hunters took specimens of a bird new to him. In the second 

 volume of his published journal, 2 he says: "It was toward eight 

 o'clock in the cool morning of May 13 (1834) that we stopped on 

 the right bank of the river and landed on a fine, green prairie, 

 beset with bushes and high isolated trees. ..We found many beau- 

 tiful birds, among which Ideria viridis and the handsome Grosbeak 

 with red breast Fringilla ludoviciana. ... At noon we reached 

 Belle-Vue, Major Dougherty's Agency.... To the naturalist the 

 surroundings of Belle-Vue were highly attractive. The beauti- 

 ful wooded hills had shady ravines and small wild valleys. . . . 

 Many, and some of them beautiful, birds animated these lovely 

 thickets, the Cuckoo, the Carolina Dove, the Red-breasted Gros- 

 beak, Sialia wilsoni, several Finches, among which Fringilla 

 cyanea and erythropthalma, and of about the same size a new species 

 which at least in Audubon's Synopsis of the year 1839 is not 

 enumerated and which I called Fringilla comata (2) " 3 The 

 (2) in the text refers to a note at the end of the chapter where a 

 description of the Harris's Sparrow is given in great detail, and 

 where the statement is made that "this bird nests in thickets 

 along the shore of the Missouri River in the neighborhood of the 

 mouth of La Platte River." The first volume of Maximilian's 



i Notes from a letter of Edward Harris, Auk, 1895, p. 227, Geo. Spencer Morris. 



2 Reis im Innern Nord-Amerika. 2 Vols. Coblentz, 1839-1841. 



3 Having access only to a reprint of this rare work in which the ornithological matter is 

 largely deleted, I am indebted to Mr. Otto Widmann for this extract which he translated 

 from the original publication. 



