114 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



ing criticism of Audubon's Biography of Birds: "a 

 want of precision in his descriptions, and a general ig- 

 norance of modern ornithology sadly disappoint the sci- 

 entific reader." The technical descriptions in that work 

 were written, as Swainson must have known, by his 

 young rival, William MacGillivray, then one of the 

 ablest exponents of the anatomy of birds in Great Brit- 

 ain; but anatomy, the master key to relationship, Swain- 

 son affected to regard with contempt, though over- 

 zealous friends had compared him with Cuvier, one of 

 the greatest masters of anatomy of all time. To follow 

 the comment of a later critic, 21 Swainson probably re- 

 garded the title of "the British Cuvier" as rather de- 

 rogatory, since he had pronounced Cuvier to have been 

 "totally unacquainted with the very first principles of 

 the natural system." To Swainson, however, as the same 

 commentator explains, "the natural system" implied the 

 concept of a magical number and a circle, ideas which 

 Cuvier would have been the first to repudiate or ignore. 



The ardent MacGillivray was naturally scornful of 

 Swainson's unscientific attitude, which he had roundly 

 scored in the introduction to his History of British Birds 

 that had begun to appear in 1837; he then said that 

 Swainson could exclaim: "How superficially do we 

 study nature," while in anatomy his own studies were 

 a century behind the times and his opinions on the 

 subject worthy of the Dark Ages. 



In his biographical notice of Audubon, Swainson 

 refers to their Paris experience in the following words: 



It is singular how two minds, possessing the same tastes, 

 can be so diversified, as to differ m toto respecting the very 

 same objects. During the whole of Mr. Audubon's residence 



21 Theodore Gill, loc. cit. 



