and OrnHhological Biography, 319 



ing, as well as of birds. He is fonder still of his own glory, 

 and he resolves to perpetuate the results of his labours, by 

 having them engraved. Then is the world gratified by tW^^ 

 sight of birds, which, in form and attitude, resemble nothing iri'' 

 existence, but which are made known by the excellent expei'^ 

 dient of engraving their names beside them ; and this man also 

 passes into immortality. Another, fond of the fireside, and of^^ 

 reading books, gathers around him the aggregated wisdom of- 

 ages ; and studying the productions of the forests of the Wa- 

 bash, or the ranges of the Himmaleh^ as delineated, not in \h&^ 

 book of nature, but in the books of men, perhaps little bettei*'^ 

 qualified than himself, and who have described birds from skin^^ 

 and feathers, with a bill stuck at the one end, and two withered J* 

 legs near the other, comes upon the astonished world in all thd^* 

 glory of authorship. Others are fond of marshalling birds into*'' 

 classes, orders, tribes, divisions, subdivisions, groups, genera,'" 

 subgenera, &c., or of wheeling them into circles, or extending'^ 

 them in lines ; or they may make them diverge from types, or -^ 

 set them a marching in pairs, or in fives ;— and many other fool- t 

 eries are played ofl'for the benefit of science. -'^ ^niiu oj cA^x^^ 



But every now and then does there appear a iittiif^ #1W)^«ies^' 

 things not as other men see them ; and he, communing with 

 Nature in the wilderness, or scrutinizing her productions in th^^^ 

 silence of his closet, elicits the elements that are one day to " 

 accumulate into the stable basis of a system which shall form a 

 temple, dedicated to the genius of the universe. Of one of 

 these men there is somewhat here to be said. 



John James Audubon, a native of Louisiana, has been from 

 early youth addicted to the admiration of nature. In a beauti- 

 ful country, teeming with animal and vegetable life, the pro- 

 fusion of which at first tended to render him undecided as to 

 the particular path which he ought to pursue ; he at length, 

 struck by the beauty and variety of the feathered tribes, their 

 manners and occupations, their wonderful migrations and thdr 

 mysterious instincts, resolved to make them the principal object * 

 of his study. A pure passion gave energy to his mind. He 

 studied nature, not with the view of immortalizing his name by 

 his discoveries, nor even with a desire of infusing a portion of 

 his spirit into his fellow men, much less with the hope of in- 

 creasing his pecuniary stores, but simply from an instinctive 



