On the same day that Townsend and Nuttall were so picturesquely entering the Indian country, Maximilian, Prince of Wied, who had spent the previous year on the upper Missouri, was making his way down-stream on his return to civilization. On May 13, 1834, when but a few miles from the northern boundary of Missouri, his hunters took specimens of a bird new to him. In the second volume of his published journal,[7] he says: “It was toward eight o’clock in the cool morning of May 13 (1834) that we stopped on the right bank of the river and landed on a fine, green prairie, beset with bushes and high isolated trees.... We found many beautiful birds, among which _Icteria viridis_ and the handsome Grosbeak with red breast _Fringilla ludoviciana_.... At noon we reached Belle-Vue, Major Dougherty’s Agency.... To the naturalist the surroundings of Belle-Vue were highly attractive. The beautiful wooded hills had shady ravines and small wild valleys.... Many, and some of them beautiful, birds animated these lovely thickets, the Cuckoo, the Carolina Dove, the Red-breasted Grosbeak, _Sialia wilsoni_, several Finches, among which _Fringilla cyanea_ and _erythropthalma_, and of about the same size a new species which at least in Audubon’s Synopsis of the year 1839 is not enumerated and which I called _Fringilla comata_ (2)”[8] The (2) in the text refers to a note at the end of the chapter where a description of the Harris’s Sparrow is given in great detail, and where the statement is made that “this bird nests in thickets along the shore of the Missouri River in the neighborhood of the mouth of La Platte River.” The first volume of Maximilian’s journal, containing the record of his trip up the Missouri, was published in 1839, while volume two, covering the period when the Sparrow was taken, did not appear until 1841. Had he published both volumes simultaneously in 1839, his specific name _comata_ would of course be current. It is interesting to note that though he took his first specimen just fifteen days after Nuttall had taken the type, and at a time when the bulk of the migrants had passed north, he had overlooked an opportunity of being the actual discoverer during the previous April, when he had been in the direct migratory path of the Sparrow at the season of its greatest abundance there.