By persistent labor the successive volumes of the "Ornithology" were issued up to the seventh, which appeared in the spring of 1813. On the 6th of July in that year he wrote: "I am myself far from being in good health. Intense application to study has hurt me much. My eighth volume is now in the press and will be published in November. One volume more will complete the whole." But he was not to see the appearance of even the eighth volume. The unremitting labor of that summer, carried on in the city, where even his tramps with his gun were cut off, so reduced his strength that he succumbed to an attack of his old enemy the dysentery and died, August 23, 1813, at the age of forty-seven. The immediate cause of the attack was his swimming a river in pursuit of a rare bird that he caught sight of while visiting a friend. Wilson died unmarried, although in his letters he condemns celibacy, and shows that he was not indifferent to female companionship. In fact, he was to have married a Miss Miller, whom he made one of his executors. George Ord, who had accompanied Wilson on some of his trips, was made a co-executor, and completed the publication of the "Ornithology," prefixing to the last volume a life of the author. The original edition of Wilson's great work is now rare. It comprises nine thin folio volumes, about eleven by fourteen inches in size. Several birds are figured on each plate—the smallest ones of life-size, the others reduced. An edition in three volumes, including the birds afterward described by Prince Bonaparte, was issued in 1829-'36,[1] and another in four volumes, edited by Prof. Robert Jameson, in 1831.
Wilson was no compiler; he took his facts from his own observations, or the accounts of those who had known the birds for a lifetime. He had, further, as Grosart says, a "magnetical sympathy with the birds whereby his descriptions of their looks and ways and faculties take the coloring of so many little biographies of personal friends."
Sir William Jardine says of Wilson: "He was the first who truly studied the birds of North America in their natural abodes, and from real observations; and his work will ever remain an ever-to-be-admired testimony of enthusiasm and perseverance—one certainly unrivaled in descriptions; and if some plates and illustrations may vie with it in finer workmanship or pictorial splendor, few, indeed, can rival it in fidelity and truth of delineation."
- ↑ "American Ornithology," by Alexander Wilson and Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte. Edited, with a Life of Wilson, by Sir William Jardine, Bart.
