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SWAINSON'S WARBLER. 



Sylvia Swainsonii. 



PLATE CXCVIII. Male. 



Shortly after the death of Wilson, one of the wise men of a certain 

 city in the United States, assured the members of a Natural History So- 

 ciety there, that no more birds would be found in the country than had 

 been described by that justly celebrated writer. Had the assertions 

 however been made in the hearing of that ornithologist, he would doubt- 

 less at once have refuted the speech of this extraordinary orator, who 

 continued as follows : — " No more Finches, no more Hawks, no more 

 Owls, no more Herons, and certainly no more Pigeons ; and as to Water 

 birds, let the list given by Wilson of such as he has not described be 

 filled, and again I say, there wiU end the American Ornithology." The 

 orator has travelled much, having gone a few miles to the eastward of his 

 own city, and even crossed the Mississippi ; but as he had predicted, he 

 never discovered a bird in all his wanderings. Time passed on, and the 

 orator has dreamed over it ; but several industrious students of nature, 

 doubting if all that he had said might really be strictly correct to the let- 

 ter, have followed in the track of Wilson, have extended their investiga- 

 tions, ransacked the deep recesses of the forests and the great western 

 plains, visited the shores of the Atlantic, ascended our noble streams, 

 and explored our broadest lakes ; — and, reader, they have found more 

 new birds than the learned academician probably knew of old ones. 

 Then, be not surprised when I assure you that our Bonapartes, our 

 Ndttalls, our Bachmans, our Coopers, Pickerings, Townsends, 

 Peals, and other zealous naturalists, have very considerably augmented 

 the Fauna of the United States. To the list of these amiable men may 

 be added the names of learned and enterprising Europeans — Parry, 

 Franklin, Richardson, Ross, Duummond, and others, who with a zeal 

 equalled only by that of Wilson himself, have crossed the broad Atlantic, 

 and made discoveries in ornithology in portions of North America, never 

 before visited, in which they have met with species that, although pre- 

 viously unknown to us, have since been found to traverse the whole 



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