46 
SEA EAGLE. 
add anything furtliei' on the subject, as the reasoning of Wilson is 
conchisive. 
Our author describes an Eagle's nest, which he visited, in company 
with the "writer of this article," on the eighteenth of May, 1812. It was 
then empty ; but from every appearance a brood had been hatched and 
reared in it that season. The following year, on the first day of 
March, a friend of ours took from the same nest three eggs, the largest 
of which measured three inches and a quarter in length, two and a 
quarter in diameter, upwards of seven in circumference, and weighed 
four ounces five drams, apothecaries weight ; the color a dirty yellowish 
white — one was of a very pale bluish white ; the young were perfectly 
formed. Such was the solicitude of the female to preserve her eggs, that 
she did not aliandon the nest, until several blows, with an axe, had been 
given the tree. 
In the history of Lewis and Clark's Expedition, we find the following 
account of an Eagle's nest, which must have added not a little to the 
picturesque elTect of the maguificent scenery at the Falls of the Mis- 
souri : 
" Just below the upper pitch is a little island in the middle of the 
river, well covered with timber. Here on a Cottonwood tree an Eagle 
had fixed its nest, and seemed the undisputed mistress of a spot, to 
contest whose dominion neither man nor beast would venture across the 
gulfs that surround it, and Avhich is further secured by the mist rising 
from the falls."* 
The Bald Eagle was observed, by Lewis and Clark, during their whole 
route to the Pacific Ocean. 
It may gratify some of our readers to be informed, that the opinion 
of Temminck coincides with ours respecting the identity of our Bald 
and Sea Eagles ; but he states that the Falco ossifragus of Gmelin, 
the Sea Eagle of Latham, is the young of the Falco albicilla, which in 
its first year so much resemljles the yearling of the IcucoceplLalus, that 
it is very difiicult to distinguish them. — Note hij Mr. Orel. 
* Hist, of the Exped. vol. i., p. 264. 
