A MEETING OF RIVALS 213 



little later in the same month we find him appealing to 

 Bartram for exact names, when he writes: 



I send for your amusement a few attempts at some of our 

 indigenous birds, hoping that your good nature will excuse their 

 deficiencies, while you point them out to me. . . . They were 

 chiefly coloured by candle-light. I have now got my collection 

 of native birds considerably enlarged, and shall endeavor, if 

 possible, to obtain all the smaller ones this summer. Be pleased 

 to mark on the drawings, with a pencil, the names of each bird, 

 as, except three or four, I do not know them. 



Wilson, practically self-taught in everything, with 

 no experience or training in drawing from nature, thus 

 began at the age of thirty-eight to make his drawings 

 of birds, before he knew the names of his subjects, and 

 twenty years before Audubon's talents were known to 

 any but members of his own family and a few intimate 

 friends. The only aid in drawing which Wilson ever 

 received appears to have come from the hints which 

 Lawson supplied. Nevertheless, the best of Alexander 

 Wilson's original drawings represent a degree of ex- 

 cellence and honest workmanship of which he had no 

 need to be ashamed, and in many instances he owed 

 far less to his engraver, Alexander Lawson, than did 

 his great rival to Robert Havell. 



In 1880 Dr. Elliott Coues examined a large collection 

 of original Wilson and Audubon drawings and manu- 

 scripts, "owned and kept with the greed of a genuine 

 bibliomaniac" by Joseph M. Wade, then editor of Fa- 

 miliar Science and Fancier's Journal. If not Wilson's 

 portfolio itself, its contents, at least, said Dr. Coues, 

 were then in Mr. Wade's possession, and this series of 

 Wilson's drawings included, he thought, more than half 



