360 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



Learned and ignorant alike were astonished at the spectacle, 

 which we will not attempt to reproduce. 



Imagine a landscape wholly American, trees, flowers, grass, 

 even the tints of the sky and the waters, quickened with a life 

 that is real, peculiar, trans-Atlantic. On twigs, branches, bits 

 of shore, copied by the brush with the strictest fidelity, sport 

 the feathered races of the New World, in the size of life, each 

 in its particular attitude, its individuality and peculiarities. 

 Their plumages sparkle with nature's own tints ; you see them 

 in motion or at rest, in their plays and their combats, in their 

 anger fits and their caresses, singing, running, asleep, just 

 awakened, beating the air, skimming the waves, or rending one 

 another in their battles. It is a real and palpable vision of the 

 New World, with its atmosphere, its imposing vegetation, and 

 its tribes which know not the yoke of man. The sun shines 

 athwart the clearing in the woods ; the swan floats suspended 

 between a cloudless sky and a glittering wave ; strange and 

 majestic figures keep pace with the sun, which gleams from the 

 mica sown broadcast on the shores of the Atlantic ; and this 

 realization of an entire hemisphere, this picture of a nature so 

 lusty and strong, is due to the brush of a single man ; such an 

 unheard of triumph of patience and genius ! — the resultant 

 rather of a thousand triumphs won in the face of innumerable 

 obstacles !" 



Another French writer 12 remarked that Audubon 

 produced the same sensation among the savants of Eng- 

 land that Franklin had made at the close of the eight- 

 eenth century among the politicians of the Old World; 

 his works, he added, should be translated into his native 

 tongue, and produced in a form which would enable 

 them to reach the library of every naturalist in France. 

 One after another the scientific, literary, and arts so- 



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13 P. A. Cap, in L' Illustration for 1851. Cap's hint was taken by 

 Eugene Bazin, who translated copious selections from the Ornithological 

 Biography, which were published in two volumes in Paris in 1857 (see 

 Bibliography, No. 38). 



