ALEXANDER WILSON. 
XI 
the United States,” says the continuator of Wilson, “ Wild Turkeys, 
like the Indian and Buffalo, have been compelled to yield to the 
destructive ingenuity of the white settlers.”* 
In those rapid changes, then, appearing to our view slow from 
their constancy, we should be in danger of losing all trace of some 
species, or of possessing a tradition or description, valuable only 
according to the station which the author of it at the time held 
in the science he professed. In this respect, the ornithology of 
North America has been most fortunate. Her naturalists have 
wrought from observations, the fruits of their own laborious 
researches, and have not trusted to the hearsay evidence of their 
predecessors ; and the species of that continent are at this time 
better known than those of any part of the world, northern 
Europe excepted. Passing from the more primitive ornithologists, 
from Edwards and Catesby, embracing in their histories the birds 
of the islands belonging to the southern continent, and also from 
the gentlemen engaged in the fur establishments, who furnished 
our earliest information regarding the more arctic inhabitants, we 
find, in the United States, the venerable Bartram and the elder 
Peale, warm admirers of nature in all her forms, paving the way 
for the favourable reception of the arduous, and then novel, 
labours of our countryman, Alexander Wilson. He was the first 
who truly studied the birds of North America in their natural abodes, 
and from real observation ; and his work will remain an ever-to-be- 
admired testimony of enthusiasm and perseverance — one certainly 
unrivalled in descriptions ; and if some plates and illustrations may 
vie with it in finer workmanship or pictorial splendour, few, indeed, 
can rival it in fidelity and truth of delineation. Since his untimely 
decease, the labours of his admirable continuator and commentator, 
the Prince of Musignano, of Mr Ord, and the younger Peale, and 
the extensive journeys of Messrs Say and Long to the interior and 
the Rocky Mountains, have done much to fill up what was wanting 
to this department of the fauna of North America; while the 
materials collected, during the different arctic expeditions, under- 
taken by this country, and particularly the last overland, under the 
charge of Captain Sir J. Franklin, have brought down our knowledge 
Bonap. Continuation, Part I. p. 80 . 
