84 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



an olfactory sense in such birds highly probable. His con- 

 tention is weakened, however, by the fact that granivo- 

 rous and insectivorous birds also possess true olfactory 

 nerves, and yet are proved by experiment to have little 

 or no effective sense of smell. It is a problem for stu- 

 dents of behavior to solve, and so far as the American 

 vultures are concerned, Audubon's and Bachman's ex- 

 periments, I believe, have never been repeated or ex- 

 tended with sufficient care to settle the question. The 

 little that has been done, however, suggests that while 

 the vulture in its daily and never ending search for food 

 is mainly guided by its keen eyes, the nose, possibly, 

 may be a cooperating factor when the wind and other 

 conditions are favorable. 



While critics were driving the pen, Audubon was 

 hard at work in the field, but his friends did not long 

 remain silent. Favorable notices of his work, actual or 

 prospective, had appeared in the scientific and literary 

 press of England, by David Brewster, Robert Jame- 

 son, William Swainson, and "Christopher North" of 

 Blackwood's Magazine. The first American notice ap- 

 peared in the American Journal of Science for 1829, 

 and this was followed by G. W. Featherstonhaugh, the 

 English geologist, in his recently established but short- 

 lived Monthly American Journal of Geology and Nat- 

 ural Science, to which we have already referred. 20 A 

 little later the London Athenceum gave the first of 

 eleven extended articles on Audubon's work; in review- 

 ing his second volume of letterpress, which appeared in 

 1834, the writer said: "There is amply sufficient remain- 

 ing in Audubon's pages for fully a dozen more notices, 

 were we disposed to follow the exhausting system. We 

 have admired Audubon's gorgeous drawings, but our 



20 See Vol. II, pp. 4 and 23, and Bibliography, No. 106. 



