A MEETING OF RIVALS 223 



"March 23, 1810.— I bade adieu to Louisville, 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 recommended, one sub- 

 scriber, nor one new bird; though I delivered my letters, ran- 

 sacked the woods repeatedly, and visited all the characters likely 

 to subscribe. Science or literature has not one friend in this 

 place." 



What actually happened at this meeting of the two 

 naturalists will never be certainly known, beyond what 

 can be gathered from their rather widely divergent ac- 

 counts. It should be noticed, however, that the para- 

 graph which Audubon quoted was extracted from Wil- 

 son's private diary; it was no doubt written on the spur 

 of the moment, possibly to humor his own mood, and 

 certainly with no thought of its later publication. It 

 was inserted by George Ord in the biographical sketch 

 of his friend appended to the ninth volume of the Amer- 

 ican Ornithology, which appeared in 1814, the year after 

 Wilson's death. Audubon was not concerned, either 

 directly or by implication, except in the last sentence, 

 for it is evident that he was not one of those to whom 

 Wilson had carried letters of introduction. Thus the 

 matter stood until 1828, when Audubon's Birds of 

 America were being engraved in England. In all prob- 

 ability the incident would never have been noticed by 

 Audubon, had not Ord seen fit to revive it when his life 

 of Wilson 14 was issued as a separate volume in that 

 year. In this edition of the biography Ord inserted 

 fuller extracts from Wilson's journal, with the evident 



" Sketch of the Life of Alexander Wilson, Author of the American 

 Ornithology, by George Ord, F. L. S. &c. pp. i-cxcix, Philadelphia, 1838; 

 taken from vol. i of an octavo edition of Wilson, edited by Ord, and issued 

 by Harrison Hall, in three volumes, at Philadelphia in 1828-29, with folio 

 atlas of plates reproduced from the original work; see Note 10, supra. 



