ALEXANDER WILSON 69 



boldly away from all the fables and hearsay reports that fill the 

 pages of the early writers and described only such birds as he had 

 himself seen and such characteristics of habit as he was personally 

 familiar with or which he had first hand from reliable observers. 



Thus relying wholly upon his own resources he produced a 

 treatise which at once placed American Ornithology upon a firm 

 basis, and upon the foundation thus laid each subsequent writer 

 from Audubon and Nuttall on, has simply added his portion 

 toward the completed structure. The first writer upon a fauna is 

 in a different position from any of those who come after, and 

 can hardly be fairly compared with them since they have all had 

 his work as a guide. 



In the case of Alexander Wilson we find him most frequently 

 compared with Audubon, since their works were of essentially 

 the same compass. From an artistic standpoint Audubon's 

 work is far superior; he was preeminently an artist, both by 

 birth and education, while Wilson made no pretensions to art; 

 but as a scientific work so far as the country covered by Wilson 

 is concerned it added but little to Wilson's accounts, and this in 

 spite of the fact that the latter's bird studies covered but ten 

 years, while Audubon had devoted thirty years to the study 

 before he began publication. Indeed, to the present day but 

 twenty-three indigenous land birds from east of the Alleghanies 

 and north of Florida have been added to Wilson's list. 



To give some idea of the rank of Wilson's work with the scien-^\ 

 tific publications of the time we may quote Baron Cuvier to the 

 effect that "he has treated of American birds better than those of j 

 Europe have yet been treated." The impetus that such a work, / 

 produced in America and by the support of American subscribers 

 must have given to American science is hard to estimate, as is also I 

 the attention which it must have directed toward America as a 

 country which not only possessed a rich fauna and flora but which 

 gave promise of producing men thoroughly capable of making 

 known its riches to the scientific world and among the van of this 

 assemblage stands Alexander Wilson, a Scotchman by birth but 

 an American in his interests and sympathies. 



