INTRODUCTION TO WATER BIRDS. 
287 
birds are more generally known and acknowledged than that of most 
others. Their comparatively large size and immense multitudes, render 
their regular periods of migration (so strenuously denied to some others) 
notorious along the whole extent of our sea-coast. Associating, feed- 
ing, and travelling together in such prodigious and noisy numbers, it 
would be no less difficult to conceal their arrival, passage and depart- 
ure, than that of a vast army through a thickly peopled country. Con- 
stituting also, as many of them do, an article of food and interest to 
man, he naturally becomes more intimately accpviainted with their habits 
and retreats, than with those feeble and minute kinds, which offer no such 
inducement, and perform their migrations with more silence in scattered 
parties, unheeded or overlooked. Hence many of the Waders can be 
traced from their summer abodes, the desolate regions of Greenland 
and Spitsbergen, to the fens and seashores of the West India Islands 
and South America, the usual places of their winter retreat, while those 
of the Purple Martin and common Swallow still remain, in vulgar belief, 
wrapped up in all the darkness of mystery. 
Philadelphia, March 1st, 1819. 
