Audubon’s Ornithology, First Volume. 345 
was resting upon it, been enabled to awaken public opinion to 
e subject, and by almost a single stride to place the study of 
natural history in that elevated rank to which it properly belongs, 
but from which it had been forever before shut out by prejudices 
as unfounded as they were narrow and contracted. 
It is not our present purpose to point out the steps by which, 
nor enumerate those through whose agency, this radical change 
in the public mind has, with unexampled rapidity, taken place ; 
but we cannot forbear to point to one whose efforts in the cause 
have been preéminent, ahd whose success has been without ex- 
ample. Our readers hardly need be told we refer to George Cu- 
vier. By his labors as a naturalist—by arranging, in a manner 
never before equalled, the objects of his research, by displaying 
at one view the wonders of the remotest ages, and of the most 
distant portions of the earth,—as the public lecturer who carried 
away with him his audience, by the variety of his illustrations, the 
vividness of his — and the fascination of his eloquence, 
—as the philosophical writer, by his powers of combination and 
analysis, by his classification of what was insulated, by giving 
system and unity to the most desultory fragments of natural sci- 
ence, by establishing new laws, by opening new fields of research, 
by throwing the light of his genius over the darkest pages of 
nature,—in fine, by a whole life devoted to that object, he carried 
away captive the intelligence of a whole people, and an almost 
universal acquiescence on the part of his countrymen in favor of 
his darling studies. The change in public opinion in favor of 
r sciences, then progressing slowly and with uncertain 
steps, received an impetus at his hands which carried it onward 
at a rapid rate, and which has since continued without intermis- 
sion, and in spite of the scoffs and the sneers of the ignorant, the 
doubting shrug of the short-sighted, or the illiberal cui bono of 
him whose contracted vision looks only to immediate advantage, 
and the dimness of whose sight will not enable him to discern 
_the remote, but not on that account less certain advantages which 
accrue to him who opens, in a proper spirit, the great book of 
nature, every page of which speaks to him so plainly of nature’s 
great Originator. . 
The day has now gone by when the field naturalist, whose 
days are spent in roaming in search of ornithological specimens, 
and whose gun is his Eee and perhaps only om 
