22 Biology in America 



Some time elapsed, during which I never heard of him, or 

 of his work. At length, having occasion to go to Philadel- 

 phia, I, immediately after my arrival there, inquired for him, 

 and paid him a visit, (but) . . . feeling, as I was forced to 

 do, that my company was not agreeable, I parted from him; 

 and after that I never saw him again. But judge of my 

 astonishment some time after when, on reading the thirty- 

 ninth page of the ninth volume of American Ornithology, I 

 found in it the following paragraph: 



" 'March 23, 1910. I bade adieu to Louisville, to which 

 place I had four letters of recommendation, and was taught 

 to expect much of everything there ; but neither received one 

 act of civility from those to whom I was recommended, one 

 subscriber, nor one new bird; though I delivered my letters, 

 ransacked the woods repeatedly, and visited all the characters 

 likely to subscribe. Science or literature has not one friend 

 in this place. ' " 1 



Alexander Wilson, the " father of American ornithology," 

 was born at Paisley, Scotland, on July 6, 1766. He was the 

 son of a weaver, who, together with his regular trade, com- 

 bined farming, distilling and smuggling. Destined by his 

 parents for the church, his studies in this direction were early 

 terminated by various vicissitudes in the Wilson family, such 

 as the advent of a step-mother and sundry children, and the 

 young Wilson became a weaver apprentice, from which pur- 

 suit his rambling propensities soon diverted him into the 

 paths of the peddler and poacher. Indulging himself in a 

 little fun at the expense of the master weavers during a trade 

 dispute, he paid penance therefor with a brief sojourn in 

 jail, after which he emigrated to America in 1794. Here he 

 earned a precarious living as peddler, printer, and school 

 teacher, the latter profession seeming to have stood as high 

 in public esteem then as now, until he made the acquaintance 

 of the younger Bartram and the engraver Lawson, under whose 

 advice and encouragement he gave himself up to his passion 

 for natural history and learned to draw the objects of his 

 search. He now devoted himself to the preparation of his 

 "American Ornithology," in the course of which he roamed 

 the wilderness of the then West, crossing the Alleghanies, 

 sailing down the Ohio, sleeping under the stars or in the fron- 

 tiersman 's "shack." In the course of these journeys "in 

 search, " as he says, ' ' of birds and subscribers, ' ' he made the 

 acquaintance of Audubon in the manner above described. 

 The first volume of his work appeared in 1808 and six others 

 followed prior to his early death in 1813, as the result of 



1 Audubon 's Ornithological Biography, quoted in ' ' Life of Audu- 

 bon," pp. 22-24. 



