322 CANADA JAY. 



I have here introduced are but a small part of the valuable 

 collection of new subjects in natural history discovered and 

 preserved, amidst a thousand dangers and difficulties, by those 

 two enterprising travellers, whose intrepidity was only equalled 

 by their discretion, and by their active and laborious pursuit of 

 whatever might tend to render their journey useful to science 

 and to their country. It was the request and particular wish 

 of Captain Lewis, made to me in person, that I should make 

 drawings of such of the feathered tribes as had been preserved, 

 and were new. That brave soldier, that amiable and excellent 

 man, over whose solitary grave in the wilderness I have since 

 shed tears of affliction, having been cut off in the prime of his 

 life, I bope I shall be pardoned for consecrating this humble 

 note to his memory, until a more able pen shall do better 

 justice to the subject. 



CANADA JAY. {Corvus Canadensis.) 



PLATE XXL— Fig. 1. 



Linn. Si/st. 158.— Cinereous Crow, Arct. Zool. p. 248, No. 137.— Lath. i. 389.— 

 Le Geay brim de Canada, Briss. ii. 54. — Buff. hi. 117. 



GARRULUS CAWADENSIS.-Swaixson. 



Corvus Canadensis, Bonap. Synop. p. 58.— Garrulus Canadensis, North. Zool. ii. 



p. 295. 



Were I to adopt the theoretical reasoning of a celebrated 

 French naturalist, I might pronounce this bird to be a debased 

 descendant from the common blue jay of the United States, 

 degenerated by the influence of the bleak and chilling regions 

 of Canada ; or perhaps a spurious production between the 

 blue jay and the cat bird: or, what would be more congenial 

 to the Count's ideas, trace its degradation to the circumstance 

 of migrating, some thousand years ago, from the genial shores 

 of Europe, where nothing like degeneracy or degradation 

 ever takes place among any of God's creatures. I shall, 

 however, on the present occasion, content myself with stating 



