THE ORNITHOLOGICAL GUIDE. 81 



i~ not to omit or alter anything? It is to be wished 

 that a modern professor had been as modest and 

 discreet in his edition of the ornithological work of 

 one of our first Ornithologists. 



Willughby having ransacked Europe in search 

 of his favorite objects, designed to visit America, 

 which design, and the manner in which it was frus- 

 trated, shall be related in Ray's own words : — " Our 

 author having made so good progress in this Work, 

 that few of our European Animals described by 

 others had escaped his view; that he might (as far 

 as in him lay) perfect the History of Animals, he 

 designed a voyage into the New World, but lived 

 not to undertake it. For about the beginning of 

 June, in the year 1672, being seized with a Pleurisy, 

 which terminated in that kind of Fever, Physicians 

 call, Catarrhalis, within less than a month after he 

 took his bed, on the third of July in the thirty- 

 seventh year of his age he departed this life to the 

 immense grief of his Friends and all good men that 

 knew him, and the great loss of the Commonwealth 

 in general." Willughby's great modesty is well 

 illustrated by his reluctance to allow what he had 

 written to be published, as related in the following- 

 passage of Ray : — " Viewing his Manuscripts, after 

 his Death, I found the several Animals in every 

 kind, both Birds, Beasts, Fishes, and Insects diges- 

 ted into a Method of his own contriving, but few 

 of their Descriptions and Histories so full and 

 perfect as he intended them ; which he was so 



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