EXTINCT PASSENGER PIGEON 
469 
This bird, after its death, was preserved by Mr. Wm. Palmer at my 
residence, and I have published an account of its gross anatomy. There 
are three other negatives of it posed by me at the photographic gal¬ 
leries of the United States National Museum, and they present the three 
different views of the specimen, namely the ventral, the dorsal and the 
lateral ones. After this specimen was mounted, I was permitted to 
make a photograph of it, and this latter has been published in The 
Conservationist, of Albany, N. Y., and in American Forestry, of 
Washington. (Fig. 6). 
If there be a figure of the Wild Pigeon in “The Game Birds of the 
United States” by the late Dr. D. G. Elliott, I do not recall it, for a 
copy of that work has not been in my hands for many years. This is 
not the case, however, with respect to the “Zoology of New York,” or 
the “New York Fauna,” by James E. de Kay. Part II. of this well- 
known and much criticized work is devoted to the Birds, and on page 
196 there is an half-page account of “Ectopistes migratoria .” The 
figure of the bird in color, five-eights natural size, is a male, engraved 
by J. W. Hill and lithographed by Endicott of New York. It is Plate 
74, being a rather pleasing, not to say fairly correct representation of 
the species. (Fig. 7). 
Coues, in his Biographical Appendix, gives the date of publication 
of this work as 1884, and says that the birds “are figured in colored 
lithographs, each plate containing two or three figures. The plates are 
all recognizable illustrations, but not of the highest order of artistic 
merit, the drawing being especially defective.” (p. 633.) 
There has been published at least one plate on which is given no 
fewer than fourteen Passenger Pigeons, representing both sexes and 
young in apparently typical plumages. This is Plate XXIX, opposite 
page 32 of “Studer’s Popular Ornithology—The Birds of North Amer¬ 
ica,”—a work illustrated throughout by Dr. Theodore Jasper, and edited 
and published under copyright in 1881 by Jacob H. Studer and Co., 
of New York and Columbus, Ohio. (Fig 8). Neither the text nor the 
plates of this folio volume seem to have met with favor in the eyes of 
ornithologists anywhere; but of all this interesting history nothing will 
be recorded here. 
To appreciate Alexander Wilson’s figure of the Wild Pigeon, one 
should see it in Volume V. of his folio set, which was published in 
Philadelphia in 1812. We find it to be Figure I . on Plate 44, oppo¬ 
site page 102, where it is designated as Columbia migratoria, and rep¬ 
resented to be of natural size. On the same plate we find Figure II., 
the Blue Mountain Warbler, and Figure III., the Hemlock Warbler 
(Fig 9). There is a peculiar quaintness and charm about Wilson’s 
figures of birds that attaches but to few others. I must believe that 
their pathetic history has something to do with all this, for we know 
that Wilson drew all his own figures of birds, while they were engraved 
