FINAL WORK DAYS 269 



John Bachman to Edward Harris 



Charleston, Decern. 24, 1845. 



Friend Harris, you can be of service to me, to the Audubons 

 & the cause of science. I will tell you how. 



I find the Audubons are not aware of what is wanted in 

 the publication of the Quadrupeds. All they care about is to 

 get out a No. of engravings in two months. They have not 

 sent me one single book out of a list of 100 I gave them and 

 only 6 lines copied from a book after having written for them 

 for 4 years. When he published his birds he collected hundreds 

 of thousands of specimens. In his Quadrupeds — tell it not in 

 Gath — He never collected or sent me one skin from New York 

 to Louisiana along the whole of the Atlantic States. Now he 

 is clamorous for the letter press — -on many of the Quadrupeds 

 he has not sent me one line & and on others he has omitted 

 even the geographical range- — I know nothing of what he did 

 in the West having never received his journal & not twenty 

 lines on the subject. I am to write a book without the infor- 

 mation he promised to give — without books of reference & 

 above all what is a sine qua non to me without specimens. In 

 the meantime my name is attached to the book, and the public 

 look to us to settle our American species, and alas I have not 

 the materials to do so. 



Now this you can do for me. I am willing to write every 

 description and every line of the book. I do it without fee or 

 reward. But — 1. Books of reference or copies of them he must 

 obtain. 2. He must publish no species without my approba- 

 tion. He has made some sad mistakes already. 3. He must 

 procure such information as I shall write for. 4. He must 

 send some person — say when John returns — to make a tour for 

 collecting specimens through the states of the west especially. 

 I find the smaller Rodentia differing every 600 miles. Richard- 

 son's species differ from those of New York — ours are once 

 more different from those of N. Y. Leib [?] found a number 

 of new species in Illinois. The New Orleans squirrels differ 

 from ours — California once more new. Now on this last par- 



