450 Memorial of George Brown Goode. 



work, of which Cuvier enthusiastically exclaimed: "C'est le plus mag- 

 nifique monument que I'Art ait encore eleve a la Nature." 



Wilson was the Wordsworth of American naturalists, but Audubon 

 was their Rubens. With pen as well as with brush he delineated those 

 wonderful pictures which have been the delight of the world. 



Born in 1781, in Louisiana, while it was still a Spanish colony, he 

 became, at an earh' age, a pupil of the famous French painter David, 

 under whose tuition he acquired the rudiments of his art. Returning to 

 America, he began the career of an explorer, and for over half a century 

 his life was spent, for the most part, in the forests or in the preparation 

 of his ornithological publications — occasionally visiting England and 

 France, where he had many admirers. His devotion to his work was as 

 complete and self-sacrificing as that of Bowditch, the stor}' of whose 

 translation of I^a Place has already been referred to. It was a great sur- 

 prise to his friends (though his own fervor did not permit him to doubt) 

 that the sale of his folio volumes was sufficient to pay his printer's bills. 

 Audubon was not a very accomplished systematic zoologist, and when 

 serious discriminations of species was necessary, sometimes formed 

 alliances with others. Thus Bachman became his collaborator in the 

 study of mammals, and the 3'outhful Baird was invited by him, shortly 

 before his death in 1851, to join him in an ornithological partnership. 

 His relations with Alexander Wilson form the subject of a most enter- 

 taining narration in the Ornithological Biography.' 



Thomas Nuttall [b. in Yorkshire, 1786; d. in St. Helens, lyancashire, 

 September 10, 1859] was so thoroughly identified with American natural 

 history and so entirely unconnected with that of England that, although 

 he returned to his native land to die, we may fairly claim him as one of 

 our own worthies. He crossed the ocean when about twent5'-one j^ears 

 of age, and traveled in every part of the United States and in the Sand- 

 wich Islands studying birds and plants. From 1822 to 1828 he was 

 curator and lecturer at the Harvard Botanical Garden. Besides numerous 

 papers in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy, he published in 

 Philadelphia, in 18 18, his Genera of North American Plants, in his 

 Geological Sketch of the Valley of the Mississippi, in 1821 ; his Journal 

 of Travels into the Arkansas Territory, a work abounding in natural his- 

 tory observations; in 1832-1834 his Manual of the Ornithology of the 

 United States and Canada ; and in 1 843-1 849 his North American Sylva, 

 a continuation of the Sylva of Michaux. About 1850 he retired to a 

 rural estate in England, where he died in 1859. 



Nuttall was not great as a botanist, as a geologist, or as a zoologist, 

 but was a man useful, beloved, and respected. 



Richard Harlan, M. D. [b. 1796, d. 1843], who, with Mitchill, Say, 

 Rafinesque, and Go.sse, was one of the earliest of our herpetologists, and 

 who was one of Audubon's chief friends and supporters, publi.shed in 



' \'<)luiiic- I , ]). 439. 



