CXIV 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
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 Susquehannah on Sunday forenoon, 
Avilh some difficulty, having to cut our way through the ice for se- 
veral 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 quad- 
rupeds 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 transmit to me such a collection of 
facts 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 snuft', of which he is insatiably fond, taking it 
by handfuls. I was much diverted Avith the astonishment he ex- 
pressed on looking at the plates of my Avork — 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 in- 
vented himself, is remarkable for ingenuity, and extremely simple. 
Having a letter from Dr. Muhlenberg to a clergyman in Hanover, 
I passed on through a Avell cultivated country, chiefly inhabited by 
Germans, to that place, Avhere a certain Judge took upon himself 
to say, that such a book as mine ought not to be encouraged^ as it 
was not ivithm the reach of the conimonality ; and therefore inconsistent 
with our republican institutions! By the same mode of reasoning, 
Avhich 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 coimnotiality, as he called them, 
and consequently 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, 
