14 The Ornithology of Chester County 



purpose the boy was engaged in filling his sack in 

 the school orchard, "out of bounds," when "Jack" 

 Townsend, his shirt bosom distended with apples; 

 crossed his path under the low branches of an apple 

 tree, and as he was about to direct the new boy 

 where the best fruit lay, he espied the broad-brim- 

 med hat of the teacher approaching along the hedge. 

 He writes of Townsend : Active in mind, ardent in 

 temperament, full of life and indefatigable in the 

 pursuit of an idea that once possessed his mind. I 

 have known him to watch for days a pair of birds 

 constructing their nest, and far more interested in 

 the operation than in the irksome study of an in- 

 doors lesson, although fully up to any one in his 

 class. It was at this early age that the incipient 

 ornithologist appeared. 



Under the stimulus of some great works on Amer- 

 ican ornithology, some of our brightest students at- 

 tempted the study of the local birds and if the 

 second quarter of the nineteenth century failed of 

 being the golden period of ornithology in Chester 

 county, it was due to Quaker modesty. 



John K., and his cousin, William P. Townsend, 7 

 and perhaps one or two others, of West Chester; 

 were the first to form a nearly complete collection 

 of local birds in the county, and the former while 

 collecting for Dr. Ezra Michener at New Garden 

 in 1833, took the unique Townsend's Bunting. In 

 1826, the Chester County Cabinet of Science was 

 established in West Chester, and when the organi- 

 zation moved into their own building erected in 

 1836, it was entered in the minutes that "the 



