LIFE 
OF 
ALEXANDER WILSON. 
In looking at our present knowledge of the natural history of 
any vast country, we generally lose sight of a very important 
circumstance, — the value which its early naturalists, and their 
sources of information, should hold, in the opinions and deductions 
that we form regarding it. Mines, as it were, of the relics of 
animal creation are daily discovered, containing forms we have 
never seen or imagined — of whose shape and figure even the 
slightest tradition does not exist; and we possess later records 
of animals and birds, whose truth we cannot substantiate, or 
of whose present existence we can find no trace. Independent, 
however, of the great changes which have taken place upon the 
surface of the earth, embracing, in their convulsions, all creation, 
whether animate or inanimate, there is one powerful existing cause, 
which tends sometimes to render of no avail, and at other times 
to vary, those laws, which would regularly influence the distribution 
of animal life in a natural or wild state, — civilization, and, conse- 
quent upon it, the extirpation of some, and the introduction and 
naturalization of other, species, to countries and climates originally 
not their own. Of these, the former is most to be dreaded. Intro- 
duction will destroy the exclusive locality; but it may benefit 
the nations or individuals who are at the trouble and expense 
of it; and the animals introduced being generally conducive to 
VOL. I. b 
