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The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Alexander Wilson (1766–1813)
Wilson, Alexander. A Scotch-American ornithologist; born at Paisley, Scotland, July 6, 1766; died in Philadelphia, Aug. 23, 1813. In early life he was a weaver and teacher. He published a volume of poems in 1790, but being sentenced for a lampoon in 1793, emigrated to America. He was employed as editor of the American edition of Rees’s ‘Cyclopædia’; but in his wanderings as peddler, he learned to love birds, and set about writing an ornithology. At his death seven volumes of this work had been published; the eighth and ninth volumes were edited by George Ord, and a continuation by Charles Lucien Bonaparte (4 vols., 1825–33). (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).