AUDUBON IN LONDON 399 



Audubon had not yet visited the great university 

 towns of England, the support of which he knew would 

 be a valuable asset, and on March 3, 1828, he set out 

 by stage for Cambridge. His driver, he remarked, 

 "held confidances with every grog-shop between Lon- 

 don and Cambridge, and his purple face gave powerful 

 evidences that malt liquor [was] more enticing to him 

 than water." His reception at Cambridge was hearty; 

 he was entertained by Professors Sedgwick, Whewell, 

 and Henslow, dined repeatedly "in Hall" with the dons, 

 and received the subscription of the librarian of the 

 University. It is interesting to recall that young 

 Charles Darwin, "the man who walks with Henslow," 

 as some of the dons called him, was then an undergrad- 

 uate at King's College, and that thirty-one years were 

 to pass before modern biology was born in 1859, the 

 year of the appearance of the epoch-making Origin of 

 Species. 



By the 15th of March Audubon was again in Lon- 

 don, and on the 24th he started for Oxford. Dr. 

 Williams, as he noted in his journal, subscribed for his 

 Birds in favor of the Radcliffe Library, as did also Dr. 

 Kidd for the Anatomical School; but, though hospita- 

 bly treated by all, not one of the twenty-four colleges 

 of that great University emulated their example, and 

 the naturalist went away disappointed. 



Upon his return to London in early April, Audubon 

 received a call from John C. Loudon, editor of the 

 Magazine of Natural History, and was invited to con- 

 tribute to that journal. "I declined," he said, "for I 

 will never write anything to call down upon me a second 

 volley of abuse. I can only write facts, and when I 

 write these, the Philadelphians call me a liar." He was 

 then chafing under the criticism which his rattlesnake 



