206 Faxon, Abbot's Drawings of Georgia Birds. Ifuhr 



Natural History form but a small part of what he produced. 

 Seventeen bound volumes of unpublished entomological draw- 

 ings in the British Museum bear witness to his zeal and activity. 1 



The place of Abbot's residence during his stay in Georgia has 

 been barely rescued from oblivion by the late Col. Charles C. 

 Jones 2 the historian of the State. From 1797 to 1847 ^ ie county 

 seat of Screven Co., Ga. was the little town of Jacksonborough, 

 situate some sixty or seventy miles N N W of Savannah and a 

 few miles west of the Savannah River. It was here, according to 

 Colonel Jones, that Abbot lived and wrought. After the removal 

 of the public buildings from Jacksonborough to Sylvania in 1847, 

 the old town was abandoned, its dwellings quickly fell to decay, 

 and now a few shards of common pottery scattered over the 

 surface of the soil alone serve to mark the place where it once 

 stood. 



From this region it is probable that most of the birds portrayed 

 by Abbot came. Yet the considerable number of shore and sea 

 birds included amongst the drawings would seem to show that 

 the artist had recourse to the sea for some of his material. 



Nineteen plates, as before said, are lost from the series. But if 

 the remaining plates be arranged according to the numbers put 

 upon them when the set was still unbroken their sequence 

 will suggest the subjects of many of the missing numbers. Thus 

 it is pretty safe to assume that Plate 16 was the male Red-winged 

 Blackbird, 23 the Baltimore Oriole, 27 the male Boat-tailed 

 Grackle, 29 the Purple Grackle, 31 the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, 44 

 the male Southern Hairy Woodpecker, 80 the Nonparafl, and so 

 following. In this way we can, with some approach to precision, 

 estimate the number of species included in the original set of 200 

 plates at about 160, — thirteen species being allowed for the nine- 

 teen missing numbers. A goodly number this, when one consid- 

 ers the period when the work was accomplished, the remoteness 

 of the artist's residence from the sea, and the fact that ornithologi- 

 cal pursuits were aside from the main purpose of his visit to 



1 See W. F. Kirby, in Can. Entomol., XX, 1888, 230. 



2 The Dead Towns of Georgia. By Charles C. Jones, p. 240. Coll. Georgia 

 Hist. Soc, IV, 1878. 



