1850 TO 1865 359 
The fact is Lockhart’s and your registers really show a more 
valuable lot of birds and eggs than all we got before. 
I will not now however attempt any discussion of the species 
you got as Prof. Baird has done that much better than I could, and 
I am very hardworked these days. 
Don’t be in a hurry to leave the North, McFarlane. I assure 
you there is little comfort in the outside world unless you love work 
more than I do. My best consolation while working so constantly 
is the thought that the sooner IJ get thro the matter in hand, so much 
the sooner I’ll start North again. In fact I hope to tie my garters 
and belt and start from St. Paul for Fort Churchill on the Bay, a 
year from next January. 
The present proposition is that I should return within the year, 
but I suspect that it is more probable that I will strike from Churchill 
to Fond du Lac on Lake Athabasca and thence down stream to the 
glorious old Mackenzie where I’ll spend a summer and go out on 
snow shoes the winter of 1866-7. 
It’s all very well to talk of the delights of the civilized world, but 
give me the comfortable North where a man can have some fun, see 
good days, and smoke his pipe unmolested. D—n civilization. Not 
that I see it so much either, for I live constantly here at the Smith- 
sonian among a set of naturalists nearly all of whom have spent their 
lives in the wilderness, and as I’m working constantly on the Arctic 
collections, my thoughts always go back to their habitats and the 
various well remembered scenes. 
I have had an enormous amount of work to do on these Arctic 
collections, and I see no possibility of my getting all done before the 
winter after next. 
After all are catalogued, labelled and systematically arranged, a 
report has to be prepared upon the Zoology of British America, which 
is to be published by this Institution. Of this it is proposed I should 
do the mammals and birds. The work on the latter will be compara- 
tively easy, or will be made so ere I come to them. There will be 
the toughest work on the mammals, and Prof. Baird wishes me to 
monograph several families (Mustelide, Arvicolide & Sciuride) of all 
North America as a preliminary. I’m commenced on Sciuride, but 
since the arrival of the northern collections (which didn’t get here 
till two or three months since) the museum work on them has pre- 
