94 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



and his flute, which seemed to increase his melancholy, and to 

 take up drawing. This accomplishment does not seem to have 

 come very naturally to him, for he made a failure of the land- 

 scapes and human figures which Lawson set before him. Still, 

 the statement of an American writer that he was " without any 

 previously suspected aptitude " is denied by Mr. Grosart, who 

 adds that drawings by him before he left Scotland are pre- 

 served in the Paisley Museum with the collection of Wilson's 

 manuscripts. Bartram and his niece, Miss Nancy, started him 

 again on easier subjects first flowers, and then birds, with 

 which he made encouraging success. 



It is in a letter to one of his Scottish biographers, his old 

 friend in Paisley, Mr. Thomas Crichton, under date of June i, 

 1803, that Wilson's determination to study the birds of America 

 is earliest recorded. " Close application to the duties of my 

 profession," he writes, " which I have followed since Novem- 

 ber, 1795, has deeply injured my constitution, the more so that 

 my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of any one's 

 in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher's life. I 

 have had many pursuits since I left Scotland mathematics, 

 the German language, music, drawing, etc., and I am now about 

 to make a collection of all our finest birds." At first he de- 

 voted only leisure hours to the birds, and his figures " were 

 chiefly coloured by candle-light," but he soon began to make 

 longer and longer expeditions. In October, 1804, he set out 

 with two companions, on foot, to visit Niagara. From there 

 he went through the lake region of central New York, visiting 

 his sister and her children, who were living on a farm that 

 Wilson and his nephew William had bought together. He 

 made his way home down the Mohawk Valley to Albany, and 

 thence by boat to New York. In this journey, occupying two 

 months, he traversed over twelve hundred miles. Winter over- 

 took him in the midst of it, so that the latter part of it was 

 made "through deep snows and almost uninhabited forests; 

 over stupendous mountains and down dangerous rivers." The 

 trip seems to have benefited both his health and spirits, for in 

 his account of it, written to Bartram, he expresses eagerness 

 for wider explorations and new discoveries. "With no family 

 to enchain my affections, no ties but those of friendship, and 

 the most ardent love of my adopted country ; with a constitu- 

 tion which hardens amid fatigues, and a disposition sociable 



