Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/417

Rh nearly six years. His own education had been limited; so, after he began to teach, he had to study diligently to make up his deficiencies. He advanced so far in mathematics that he was enabled to take occasional employment as a surveyor.

After leaving Milestown he taught for a while at Bloomfield, N. J., but he found this place disagreeable, and he was at the same time burdened with a trouble, only dimly revealed in his letters, but in which one of the Milestown young ladies figured. He became very despondent, and even thought of returning to Scotland. It was not long before he obtained a school at Kingsessing, near Gray's Ferry, on the Schuylkill. His removal to this place was attended with important results. He became acquainted with William Bartram, whose famous garden was not far away, and with Alexander Lawson, the engraver, both of whom became his steadfast friends. Bartram lent him books, among them, the works of Catesby and Edwards. In the parts of these works relating to American birds, Wilson's own acquaintance with the birds was enough to show him an exasperating number of errors, false theories, and caricatured figures. During the early part of his life at this place Wilson was so despondent that Lawson at one time feared for his reason, and advised him to give up poetry and his flute, which seemed to increase his melancholy, and to take up drawing. This accomplishment does not seem to have come very naturally to him, for he made a failure of the landscapes and human figures which Lawson set before him. Still, the statement of an American writer, that he was "without any previously suspected aptitude," is denied by Mr. Grosart, who adds that drawings by him before he left Scotland are preserved in the Paisley Museum with the collection of Wilson's manuscripts. Bartram and his niece, Miss Nancy, started him again on easier subjects, first flowers, and then birds, with which he made encouraging success.

It is in a letter to one of his Scottish biographers, his old friend in Paisley, Mr. Thomas Crichton, under date of June 1, 1803, that Wilson's determination to study the birds of America is earliest recorded. "Close application to the duties of my profession," he writes, "which I have followed since November, 1795, has deeply injured my constitution, the more so that my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of any one's in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher's life. I have had many pursuits since I left Scotland—mathematics, the German language, music, drawing, etc., and I am now about to make a collection of all our finest birds." At first he devoted only leisure hours to the birds, and his figures "were chiefly colored by candle-light," but he soon began to make longer and longer expeditions. In October, 1804, he set out with two companions, on foot, to visit Niagara. From there he went through the lake region of central New York,