> If seasonal birds did, in the time of their absence from us, reside anywhere in this earth, it is likely that someone would in one age or other have discovere

> If seasonal birds did, in the time of their absence from us, reside anywhere in this earth, it is likely that someone would in one age or other have discovered the place; but I cannot, from any record of the learned or distinct and reasonable account of other men, find that there is any man who has seen them out of their seasons; and therefore I conclude they are nowhere in this our earth. I don’t know this Charles Morton. But, with all due respect to the guy, I bet his colleagues would have pointed out the weakness of his argument… Morton must have known about the existence of South America (and the vast tracts of unexplored N. America) as well as Asia and Africa. Surely he wouldn’t have expected to have found treatises on bird populations written by Incas and Zulus, Chinamen and Mongols, in whatever collection of writings he had access to. I think he may have really wanted to believe in the moon theory. Perhaps thats the lesson here… not so much missing data, as a blind spot for fallacies when you have a cool thing you want to believe in.