LIFE OF WILSON. 
Ixxi 
■with civility, passed some good-natured conipliments on tlie voliinies, and 
readily added his name to my list. He seems an active man, of plain good 
sense, and little ceremony. By Mr. L. I was introduced to many members of 
both houses, but I found them, in general, such a pitiful, squabbling, political 
mob; so split up, and justling about the mere formalities of legislation, with- 
out knowing anything of its realities, that I abandoned them in disgust. I 
must, however, except from this censure a few intelligent individuals, friends 
to science, and possessed of taste, who treated me with great kindness. On 
Friday evening I set out for Columbia, where I spent one day in vain. I 
crossed the Susquehanna on Sunday forenoon, with some difficulty, having to 
cut our way through the ice for several hundred yards ; and passing on to York, 
paid my respects to all the literati of that place without success. Five miles 
north of this town lives a very extraordinary character, between eighty and 
ninety years of age, who has lived by trapping birds and quadrupeds these 
thirty years. Dr. F. carried me out in a sleigh to see him, and presented me 
with a tolerably good full length figure of him ; he has also promised to trans- 
mit to me such a collection of fiicts relative to this singular original, as will 
enable me to draw up an interesting narrative of him for the Port Folio. I 
carried him half a pound of snuff, of which he is insatiably fond, taking it by 
handfuls. I was much diverted with the astonishment he expressed on looking 
at tlie plates of my work — he could tell me anecdotes of the greater part of the 
subjects of the first volume, and some of the second. One of his traps, which 
he says he invented himself, is remarkable for ingenuity, and extremely simple. 
Having a letter from Dr. Muhlenberg to a clergyman in Hanover, I passed oa 
through a well cultivated counti-y, chiefly inhabited by Germans, to that place, 
where a certain judge took upon himself to say, that such a book as mine 
ought not to he encouraged, as it loas nut within the reach of the commonality ; 
and therefore inconsistent with our rejyuhiican institutions ! By the same mode 
of reasoning, which I did not dispute, I undertook to prove him a greater 
culprit than myself, in erecting a large, elegant, three-story brick house, so 
much beyond the reach of the coynmonalify , as he called them, and conse- 
quently grossly contrary to our republican institutions. I harangued this 
Solomon of the Bench more seriously afterwards, pointing out to him the great 
influence of science on a young rising nation like ours, and particularly the 
science of Natural History, till he began to show such symptoms of intellect, as 
to seem ashamed of what he had said. 
" From Hanover I passed through a thinly inhabited country ; and crossing 
the North Mountain, at a pass called Newman's Gap, arrived at Chambersburg, 
whence I next morning returned to Carlisle, to visit the reverend doctors of 
the college. * * * * 
" The towns of Chambersburg and Shippensburg produced me nothing. On 
Sunday, the 11th, I left the former of these places in the stage-coach j and in 
fifteen miles began to ascend the Alpine regions of the Alleghany mountains, 
where above, around, and below us, nothing appeared but prodigious declivities, 
covered with woods ; and, the weather being fine, such a profound silence 
prevailed among these aerial solitudes, as impressed the soul with awe, and a 
kind of fearful sublimity Something of this arose from my being alone, hav- 
