98 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



own biographer, Robert Buchanan, "cum grano salts" while 

 Grosart, eager in defence of Wilson, does not hesitate to call it 

 "a tissue of lies," except his admission that vanity kept him 

 from subscribing to Wilson's work. 



Turning southward, Wilson crossed Kentucky to Tennessee, 

 and proceeded through the Chickasaw and Choctaw countries 

 to Natchez, and thence went to New Orleans. 



By persistent labour the successive volumes of the Ornithol- 

 ogy were issued up to the seventh, which appeared in the 

 spring of 1813. On the 6th of July in that year he wrote: " I 

 am myself far from being in good health. Intense application 

 to study has hurt me much. My eighth volume is now in the 

 press and will be published in November. One volume more 

 will complete the whole." But he was not to see the appear- 

 ance of even the eighth volume. The unremitting labour of 

 that summer, carried on in the city, where even his tramps 

 with his gun were cut off, so reduced his strength that he suc- 

 cumbed to an attack of his old enemy the dysentery and died, 

 August 23, 1813, at the age of forty-seven. The immediate 

 cause of the attack was his swimming a river in pursuit of a 

 rare bird that he caught sight of while visiting a friend. 



Wilson died unmarried, although in his letters he condemns 

 celibacy, and shows that he was not indifferent to female com- 

 panionship. In fact, he was to have married a Miss Miller, 

 whom he made one of his executors. George Ord, who had 

 accompanied Wilson on some of his trips, was made a coexec- 

 utor, and completed the publication of the Qrnithology, pre- 

 fixing to the last volume a life of the author. The original 

 edition of Wilson's great work is now rare. It comprises nine 

 thin folio volumes, about eleven by fourteen inches in size. 

 Several birds are figured on each plate the smallest ones of 

 life size, the others reduced. An edition in three volumes, in- 

 cluding the birds afterward described by Prince Bonaparte, 

 was issued in i829-'36,* and another in four volumes, edited 

 by Prof. Robert Jameson, in 1831. 



Wilson was no compiler ; he took his facts from his own 

 observations, or the accounts of those who had known the birds 

 for a lifetime. He had, further, as Grosart says, a " magnet- 



* American Ornithology, by Alexander Wilson and Prince Charles Lucien 

 Bonaparte. Edited, with a Life of Wilson, by Sir William Jardine, Bart. 



