Lawson—Thure Kumlien. 
669 
“I am poor, Sir, I have to work hard to support my family and I see 
money but seldom. I was not brought up to work with make [which 
makes it] come harder for me; still I can live well here being content 
with little. I have bought another 40 acres of land and when I get that 
paid for (nearly 200$) and some more improved I calculate to let out 
on shares and I hope I would be able to live, with the addition of some 
work, on half what the field will yield and then I will have time for birds 
& flowers of which two things I have been passionately fond ever since 
a child and ‘quo semel est imbuta recens servabit dorem test diu.’ ” 
In another letter he writes Dr. Brewer an apology for not 
finding as many eggs to send him as was expected. He adds: 
“Having been obliged to work hard for a living, and not being used to 
hard labor, as I have passed my days at school and college, I have had 
but little time for hunting and explorations”. 
To come to America he had borrowed money of Baron Carl 
Grustaf Lowenhjelm, a nobleman, who was splendid in patiently 
awaiting the return of the loan, which he finally received entire. 
In one of Kumlien’s letters to the Baron he mentions something 
of the serious difficulties for him in this very new country. The 
land he had settled on was covered with a dense forest of hard¬ 
wood, and one can see the hardships of a pioneer who did not un¬ 
derstand how to swing an axe. He writes: 
“When I came here I did not understand anything about farming, or 
how to handle an axe, or a plow, and in such a country as this”. 
In a letter to Dr. Brewer he writes: 
“I am glad to get fifty cents apiece for yellow-headed blackbird skins, 
and I wish I could sell many for that price. It is easier for me to kill and 
skin a bird than it is to go out and work hard for fifty cents a day for 
a farmer”. 
To these pioneer struggles of the naturalist the writer of a 
paper in The Auk thus refers: 
“He was a zealous collector and acute observer, a man of high intel¬ 
lectual culture, and most amiable and unassuming in character. His youth¬ 
ful love for scientific pursuits persisted through life, but in consequence 
of his untoward surroundings and isolation from large museums and li¬ 
braries, his investigations were necessarily limited to the products of the 
woods and prairies of his immediate vicinity. His early pioneer life was 
thus unfavorable to the spirit of research and he has consequently left no 
published works or papers of any great importance. His influence, how¬ 
ever, upon the rising generation of naturalists with whom he came in con¬ 
tact was most efficient and encouraging. Ornithology and botany were 
