BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



83 



mens for exchange with naturahsts in Paris, where he was hving as a student of 

 medicine. I must have sent him a vast number." 



In the summer of 1848 J. Elliot Cabot accompanied Louis Agassiz on a 

 scientific expedition to the northern shores of Lake Superior. The party also 



included — besides a number of Harvard instructors and undergraduates the 



eminent entomologist, Dr. John L. LeConte. Professor Agassiz's well-known 

 book 1 relating to this expedition opens with a ' Narrative of the Tour ' by Mr. 

 Cabot. This paper contains, in addition to a ' Report of the Birds collected and 

 observed at Lake Superior,' comparatively little ornithological matter ; although 

 pleasingly written, it is inferior, in respect to literary finish and attractiveness, to 

 ' Sedge-birds,' which Mr. Cabot published some twenty years later .^ He died in 

 Brookline on January 16, 1903. 



Edward C. Cabot was an architect by profession. Having the artistic tem- 

 perament and being, like all true artists, keenly alive to the beautiful in nature, 

 he loved birds and also knew them fairly well, although they do not seem to have 

 interested him deeply. He was about intermediate in age between his brothers 

 Samuel and J. Elliot, and his death occurred in January, 1901. 



During most of the period between 1832 and 1840 the three brothers 

 were frequently together in Cambridge. They were all sportsmen, and also 

 more or less interested in birds from the standpoint of the ornithologist. Both 

 interests drew them to Fresh Pond and the neighboring swamps, of which J. 

 Elliot Cabot afterwards wrote with such exquisite grace and feeling in his 

 ' Sedge-birds.' As we may gather from this delightful little essay, he and his 

 brothers followed the early morning shooting at Fresh Pond with some regu- 

 larity during their college days. For several years they shot over live decoys 

 in Cambridge Nook where, at the outlet of the pond, they had a brush stand, of 

 which a sketch, kindly drawn for me from memory by Mr. Edward C. Cabot 

 shortly before his death, is here reproduced. They were also fond of paddling 

 in a canoe from Fresh Pond to Spy Pond by way of Alewife Brook and Little 

 River, starting in the early morning, dining at the old Cooper Tavern in 

 Menotomy Village, as Arlington was still called in those days, and returning over 

 the same route late in the afternoon. It was by no means uncommon for them 

 to shoot as many as twenty or thirty Black Ducks and Wood Ducks during such 

 an excursion. Of these and kindred matters Dr. Samuel Cabot talked most 

 entertainingly up to the very close of his long and useful life, for his interest in 

 ornithology was ever almost if not quite as keen as that in the practice of medi- 

 cine, by which he chiefly distinguished himself. On the occasion of our last 



' L. Agassiz, Lake Superior: its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals, 1850. 

 2 J. E. Cabot, Atlantic Monthly, XXIII, 1869, 384-386. 



