116 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



never stood still. Audubon drew heavily upon his more 

 learned associates, and he could give as well as take. 

 When working under the influence of a powerful motive, 

 he improved as rapidly in his use of English words as 

 he had in the finish and composition of his pictures; 

 he soon came to write not only with fluency but at 

 times with eloquence, and the technicalities of his sci- 

 ence did not remain to him a sealed book, though for 

 the drudgery of detailed description he had confessedly 

 no stomach. 



We have referred to William Swainson's advocacy 

 of the "Circular" or "Quinarian" system of the classifi- 

 cation of animals, with him amounting almost to a 

 monomania, which was one of the most notorious exam- 

 ples of reasoning in a circle of which zoologists have 

 ever been guilty. It was a serious attempt to rational- 

 ize nature in a wholly irrational manner, and must be 

 regarded as a curious by-product of minds fixed in the 

 belief of a special creation, to whom every form of 

 evolutionary doctrine was sacrilegious and abhorrent. 

 Its advocates, nevertheless, were sincere, and Swainson 

 probably regarded himself as a martyr to the cause. As 

 a later critic remarked, the system served him well by 

 investing with a cloak of originality his treatises on those 

 classes of animals with which he had little first-hand 

 knowledge. His work on fishes is regarded as "a lit- 

 erary curiosity, the appearance of which was a misfor- 

 tune to a man who, by his indefatigable industry under 

 by no means favorable circumstances, had contributed 

 as much as any of his contemporaries to the advance- 

 ment of Zoology and its diffusion among the people." 22 

 This egregious doctrine, which its disciples called "the 

 natural system" without grasping the true meaning of 



"Albert Gunther, loc. cit. 





