4 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sious of the people and places that he visited, are delightfully 

 recorded in the letters which Mr. Grosart collected. 



At Hanover, Pa., he met a judge who condemned his work 

 because " it was not within the reach of the commonality, and 

 therefore inconsistent with our republican institutions." Wilson 

 turned the tables on this learned man by showing that the judge's 

 elegant three-story brick house was open to the same objection ; 

 and then in a more serious vein pointed out to him the benefit 

 which a young, rising nation can derive from science, " till he 

 began to show such symptoms of intellect as to seem ashamed of 

 what he said." From Pittsburg Wilson made his way in a skiff 

 down the Ohio over seven hundred miles, nearly to Louisville, 

 stopping at the important towns on the way. 



At Louisville one of the persons on whom he called was Audu- 

 bon, then thirty years old and engaged in business. Audubon 

 has left an account of this meeting, in which he thus describes 

 Wilson's physical appearance : " How well do I remember him as 

 he walked up to me ! His long, rather hooked nose, the keenness 

 of his eyes, and his prominent cheek-bones, stamped his counte- 

 nance with a peculiar character. . . . His stature was not above 

 the middle size." Audubon claims that he was about to subscribe 

 for the " Ornithology," but a complimentary reference to his own 

 knowledge of birds, spoken in French by his partner, checked 

 him. "Vanity and the encomium of my friend prevented me 

 from subscribing," he writes, and to this he adds that he lent 

 some of his drawings to Wilson, and hunted with him, obtain- 

 ing some birds which the latter had never seen before. Audu- 

 bon states also that being in Philadelphia some time afterward 

 he called on Wilson, who received him with civility, but did not 

 speak of birds or drawings. Against this story must be set the 

 following extract from Wilson's diary published in the ninth vol- 

 ume of the " Ornithology " : " March 23d, I bade adieu to Louis- 

 ville, to which place I had four letters of recommendation, and 

 was taught to expect much of everything there; but neither 

 received one act of civility from those to whom I was recom- 

 mended, one subscriber, nor one new bird ; though I delivered my 

 letters, ransacked the woods repeatedly, and visited all the char- 

 acters likely to subscribe. Science or literature has not one friend 

 in this place." " We must take Audubon's account," says his own 

 biographer, Robert Buchanan, " cum grano salis," while Grosart, 

 eager in defense of Wilson, does not hesitate to call it " a tissue of 

 lies," except his admission that vanity kept him from subscribing 

 to Wilson's work. 



Turning southward, Wilson crossed Kentucky to Tennessee, 

 and proceeded through the Chickasaw and Choctaw countries to 

 Natchez, and thence went to New Orleans. 



