OR, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIRDS OF THE UNITED STATES. BY ALEXANDER WILSON; WITH A CONTINUATION BY CHARLES LUCIAN BONAPARTE, PRINCE OF MUSIGNANO. THE ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES, AND LIFE OF WILSON, BY SIR WILLIAM JARDINE, BART. F.R.S.E. F.L.S. MEMBER OF THE WERNERIAN NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, FELLOW OF THE ZOOLOGICAL IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. MDCCCXXXII. WHITTAKER, TREACHER, & ARNOT, LONDON; STIRLING & KENNEY, EDINBURGH. CONTENTS OF VOLUME FIRST. The names printed in Italics are species not contained in the original, which have been 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, consequent 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. Introduction 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 |