1893. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 43 
be hoped that it will be continued. This is, we believe, the first 
instance of a monument being erected to a scientific man in this 
city. 
The committee had another plan which they had hoped to 
carry out, which was to raise a fund sufficient for the founding 
of an Audubon scholarship for the prosecution of researches in 
natural history in this Museum of Natural History. It was 
found impracticable to carry out the plan, but it is hoped that 
some one, either within the reach of my voice, or at this sugges- 
tion, may found a scholarship for the prosecution of original 
studies in natural history in connection with this museum, and 
that in this way a large amount of research may be made in 
both the living and fossil animals of which this country is so 
full. What remains of the fund, after paying all the expenses, 
will be devoted to the founding of an Audubon publication fund 
in the New York Academy of Sciences. 
The following address was then delivered : 
The Life and Services of John James Audubon. 
BY DANIEL G. ELLIOT, F. R. S. E. 
Mr. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN—Should we desire to 
seek for the beginnings of Ornithology, we must look for them 
in the period when our old earth was yet young; when that 
strange creature, more bird than reptile, more reptile than bird, 
according to the impressions received by those who have studied 
its remains in the slab of Solenhofen, the Archaeopteryx, winged 
its feeble flight above the landscape of the Jurrassic Age. 
Evolved from its wholly reptilian ancestors, this, so far as we 
know, was the first creature provided with wings composed of 
feathers to bear it onward and upward in the atmosphere. 
There were no artists upon the earth in those days to trans- 
mit to us the portraits of animals then living, but nature has 
carefully wrapped this creature in the stone to remain forever 
an object of our wonder and our admiration. 
Unknown ages rolled along, and man appeared upon the 
scene, but in the evidences of their existence that the pre-historic 
races have left behind them, no incised stone, or bone, or 
ivory, contains any representation of birds. 
It is only when we reach what may be deemed modern times, 
in comparison to the periods of which I have referred, that we 
meet with colored pictures of birds, and although it is now more 
than three thousand years since the artist painted their por- 
