CHAP. XVI.] DR. BACHMAN S ZOOLOGY. 227 



On listening to complaints against the English press, my 

 thoughts often recurred to Bonaparte s prosecution of the royalist 

 emigrant, Peltier, after the peace of Amiens, February, 1803, 

 and the appeal to the jury of Sir James Mackintosh, as counsel 

 for the defendant, on the want of dignity on the part of the First 

 Consul, then in reality the most powerful sovereign in Europe, 

 in persecuting a poor, defenseless, and proscribed exile, for abusive 

 editorial articles. The court and jury were probably of the same 

 mind ; but the verdict of guilty showed that they deemed it no 

 light matter that the peace of two great nations should be dis 

 turbed, by permitting anonymous libels, or a continued outpour 

 ing of invective and vituperation, calculated to provoke the ruler 

 of a friendly country. In America the sovereign people read 

 every thing written against them, as did Napoleon to the last, 

 and, like him, with unmitigated resentment. 



Before leaving Charleston I called on Dr. Bachman, whose 

 acquaintance I had made in 1842, and was glad to see on his 

 table the first volumes of a joint work by himself and Audubon, 

 on the land quadrupeds of North America. These authors will 

 give colored figures and descriptions of no less than 200 mam 

 malia, exclusive of cetacea, all inhabiting this continent between 

 the southern limits of the Arctic region and the Tropic of Cancer, 

 for they now include Texas in the United States. Not more 

 than seventy-six species are enumerated by preceding naturalists, 

 and several of these are treated by Bachman and Audubon not 

 as true species but mere varieties. Their industry, however, in 

 augmenting the list of new discoveries, is not always welcomed 

 by the subscribers, one of whom has just written to say, &quot; if you 

 describe so many squirrels, I can not go on taking in your book.&quot; 

 The tribe alluded to in this threatening epistle, especially the 

 striped species, is most fully represented in North America, a 

 continent so remarkable for its extent of woodland and the variety 

 of its forest trees. Yet, after traveling so much in the woods, I 

 had never got sight of more than three or four species, owing, I 

 am informed, to their nocturnal habits. I regretted that I had 

 not yet seen the flying squirrel in motion, and was surprised to 

 hear that Dr. Bachman had observed about a hundred of them 



