BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



73 



By the middle of September, 1663, Josselyn was again at Black Point, 

 reaching it, as before, in a coasting vessel from Boston. His second stay at 

 this place apparently lasted for upwards of eight consecutive years. At least 

 there appears to be no evidence that he went elsewhere during this period. It 

 is therefore probable that a large proportion of the facts and fables reported 

 in his books relate more or less directly to this particular locality or to the wil- 

 derness that bounded it on the west and north. After leaving it for the last 

 time, at the close of August, 1671, Josselyn returned to Boston, sailing thence 

 for England on the loth of the following October.' 



Josselyn was a fluent and interesting writer, but what he has to say regard- 

 ing the birds and mammals of New England appears to have been taken chiefly 

 at second-hand and often on more than doubtful authority. He gave particular 

 attention to plants, and especially to their medicinal properties, but Tuckerman 

 says that " his curiofity in natural hiftory, and efpecially in botany, is his chief 

 merit ; and this now gives almoft all the value that is left to his books." ^ We 

 may picture him as an intelligent, well-educated but ease-loving man who pre- 

 ferred sitting with a book by his brother's fireside at Black Point to tramping 

 with dog and gun across treacherous marshes or through difficult forest paths, 

 but who, nevertheless, was not without interest in the plant and animal life of 

 the regions which he visited. Naturahsts who lack extensive field experience 

 are seldom competent judges of the value and accuracy of field observations 

 made by others, and Josselyn was no exception to this rule. Indeed he ap- 

 pears to have lent a credulous ear to almost everything that was told him by 

 the colonists and Indians, for his text abounds in absurd or exaggerated state- 

 ments. Thus he tells of a "Triton " or " Mereman " reported at Casco Bay, of 

 a sow that, being killed, was found to have twenty-five pigs "within her belly," ^ 

 of a Snow Goose with three hearts, etc. The Moose, he says, is "twelve foot" 

 high " from the toe of the fore-foot, to the pitch of the fhoulder " and the tips 

 of its horns "are fometimes found to be two fathom [z. e., twelve feet !] afun- 

 der." * 



Nuttall's ' Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada ' 

 was written in Cambridge, and much of the original matter which it contains 

 apparently relates to observations made in the immediate neighborhood of that 



^ All the dates given by me in the above accounts of Morton's, Wood's and Josselyn's visits to 

 New England were taken from the works of these authors, and hence are ' old style ' dates. 

 'E. Tuckerman, John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered, 1865, Introd., 9. 

 ^ John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New-England, ed. 2, 1675, 23, 25. W. Veazie's reprint, 1865, 



23. 24. 



* lUd., 88, 89. Ibid., 70. 



