through the recently acquired Territory of Louisiana, then offered himself to President Jefferson for this service. "Mr. Wilson," says Ord, "was particularly anxious to accompany Pike, who commenced his journey from the cantonment on the Missouri, for the sources of the Arkansas, etc., on the 15th of July, 1806." But no reply was made to his application.
In April he was engaged by the publishers, Messrs. Bradford and Inskeep, as assistant editor for the revision of Rees's "New Cyclopædia," on "a generous salary," namely, nine hundred dollars a year. He now gave up school-keeping, which had been his calling for ten years. While in this position, he made known his plans for the "American Ornithology" to Bradford, who readily agreed to undertake its publication. A prospectus was immediately issued, and a year later, in September, 1808, the first volume of the work appeared. In the fall of that year he made a trip through New England, "in search of birds and subscribers." On the way from Philadelphia he stopped at Princeton, to show his work to the college professors. He expected to get some valuable information on American birds from the Professor of Natural History, "but," he writes, "I soon found, to my astonishment, that he scarcely knew a sparrow from a woodpecker." Wherever he showed his book to college professors, and other literary men, the highest praise was lavished upon it, but subscriptions were not so freely forthcoming, the price, one hundred and twenty dollars, being a serious obstacle. He wrote from Albany, on his way home, that he had obtained only forty-one subscribers. One of the less intelligent personages, whose favor he had sought, was the then Governor of New York—Daniel D. Tompkins. This magnate, as Wilson informs us, "turned over a few pages, looked at a picture or two, asked me my price, and, while in the act of closing the book, added, 'I would not give a hundred dollars for all the birds you intend to describe, even had I them alive.'"
He soon set off again on a trip through Baltimore, Washington (where he was received "very kindly" by Jefferson), and other Southern cities, and when he reached home had in all two hundred and fifty subscribers. In the South he shot several new birds. It was now deemed advisable to add three hundred impressions of Volume I to the two hundred first struck off, and the second volume started with an edition of five hundred copies. His undertaking had already won him "reputation and respect," but the pecuniary return was still doubtful.
Volume II of the "Ornithology" was ready in 1810, and in February of that year Wilson set out on another hunt for new specimens of the feathered tribes and those rare birds—subscribers. His varied adventures on these expeditions, and his impres-
