72 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



than Morton, he certainly excelled him as a naturalist and writer. His zoologi- 

 cal interests were wider and deeper, he had a saner and more logical mind, while 

 in respect to literary ability his superiority is especially marked. When writing 

 of matters which had come under his personal observation he was habitually 

 careful and moderate of statement, but he occasionally allowed himself to be 

 betrayed into crediting, and also repeating, untrustworthy testimony regarding 

 birds and mammals with which he was unacquainted. Singularly enough the 

 text of the reckless and unprincipled Morton is almost wholly free from bor- 

 rowed evidence of this character. 



Wood is said to have returned to Lynn the year (1635) after his book was 

 published, and to have " represented that settlement in the Massachusetts 

 Legislature in 1636. He led a colony of fifty to Sandwich, Mass., in 1637, 

 and then suddenly disappears from the printed records. He evidently was 

 a learned business man, loving the wilderness, and extraordinarily at home with 

 the American Indians, of whom he is a most accurate reporter." ^ 



John Josselyn's ' New-Englands Rarities ' was published in 1672, and his 

 •Two Voyages to New-England' in 1674. The earlier of his two voyages was 

 undertaken in 1638, when he landed at Noddle's Island in Boston Harbor on 

 July 10, and after remaining there two days went directly by sea to Black Point 

 (now Scarborough, Maine). Here he spent rather more than a full year, return- 

 ing to Boston in September, 1639, and to England that same autumn. His 

 second voyage was made in 1663, when he arrived at Boston on July 28. The 

 following six weeks were apparently devoted to accumulating information regard- 

 ing the already numerous towns and settlements of southern New England. Of 

 these he treats at considerable length but in terms which indicate that his knowl- 

 edge of them was largely derived from a study of books and maps, supplemented 

 by hearsay evidence. It is probable, however, that on this and perhaps subse- 

 quent occasions he visited most of the places lying near Boston and along the 

 coast to the northward as far as Portland, Maine. Cambridge, he says, was then 

 " the neateft and beft compacted Town, having many fair ftructures and hand- 

 fom contrived ftreets ; the Inhabitants rich, they have many hundred Acres of 

 land paled with one common fence a mile and half long, and ftore of Cattle." ^ 

 He also tells us that "in 1669 the pond that lyeth between Water-town a.nd 

 Cambridge \i. e., Fresh Pond], caft its fifh dead upon the fhore, forc't by a min- 

 eral vapour as was conjectured." ^ 



• E. M. Boynton, William Wood, New Englands Prospect, 1898, Introd., iii-iv. 

 'John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New-England, ed. 2, 1675, 165. W. Veazie's reprint, 1865, 

 127. 



^ Ibid., 189. IHd., 145. 



