330 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



Audubon's drawings and anxious to secure his services 

 for his own work, then well in hand. This was the 

 American Ornithology, for which Titian R. Peale was 

 then making the drawings, and Thomas Lawson, who 

 had been Wilson's engraver, was engaged on the plates ; 

 though quite distinct in itself, this was much in the style 

 of Wilson's earlier work, of which it was virtually a 

 continuation. When Bonaparte introduced Audubon 

 to these men, it is not surprising that the meeting was 

 not productive of the best of feeling on either side. 

 Peale's stiff and rather conventional portraits of birds 

 naturally failed to awaken enthusiasm in "the trader 

 naturalist," as some who looked upon him as a rival 

 rather contemptuously called him. The interview with 

 Lawson, if correctly reported by his friend, 5 shows that 

 his interest could not have been of the most disinterested 

 sort. "Lawson told me," said this reporter, "that he 

 spoke freely of the pictures, and said that they were ill 

 drawn, not true to nature, and anatomically incorrect." 

 Thereupon Bonaparte defended them warmly, saying 

 that he would buy them and that Lawson should en- 

 grave them. "You may buy them," said the Scotchman, 

 "but I will not engrave them . . . because ornithology 

 requires truth in the forms, and correctness in the lines. 

 Here are neither." Other meetings are said to have fol- 

 lowed, but to have ended only in mutual dislike. Never- 

 theless, one of Audubon's drawings was engraved by 

 Lawson and appeared in Bonaparte's work, 6 but most 



work of Wilson was revised by Ord, but he added only two that were 

 new, Cooper's Hawk, (Accipiter cooperi), named after William Cooper of 

 New York, and Say's Phoebe (Sayornis saya), dedicated to Thomas Say, and 

 first procured by Titian R. Peale in the Rocky Mountain districts of the 

 Far West. Perhaps his most important technical work, the Conspectus 

 Generum Avium, begun in 1850, was incomplete at the time of his death. 



6 William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of 

 Design in the United States (Bibl. No. 59), vol. ii, p. 402 (New York, 1834). 



"The Boat-tailed Crackle, vol. i, plate iv. 



