132 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



forms, which have no precise term of comparison in objects 

 previously known. Correct figures alone can supply the im- , 

 perfection of language. Here the labours of which it is our 

 duty to render an account acquire a new interest. Fifteen 

 hundred drawings or paintings, executed by Mr. Lesueur with 

 extreme precision, reproduce the principal objects which were 

 collected by his careful industry and that of his friend. All 

 these drawings, either made from living animals or recent 

 specimens, form the most complete and the most precious 

 series of the kind that we have any knowledge of." 



Of Lesueur's share in the work the report says further : 

 " You have seen, by what we have said of the labours of Le- 

 sueur, that he was almost everywhere an associate in those of 

 Peron. The natural history of man is not less indebted to him. 

 All the details of the existence of the natives have been de- 

 signed by him with the most scrupulous accuracy. All their 

 musical instruments, those of war, of hunting, of fishing; their 

 domestic utensils; all the peculiarities of their clothing, of their 

 ornaments, of their habitations, of their tombs in a word, all 

 that their rude ingenuity has been able to accomplish, is found 

 united in the productions of this skilful and indefatigable art- 

 ist. The principal sites of the coasts explored by the expedi- 

 tion ; different views of the town of Sydney, the capital of the 

 English colony of New South Wales, its plan, etc., give to the 

 Atlas of the History of the Voyage, edited by his friend, a new 

 character of importance." 



The Government now provided for the publication of a 

 history of the voyage, under the editorship of Pe"ron, with an 

 atlas by Lesueur. The first volume of the Voyage de Decou- 

 vertes aux Terres Australes appeared in 1807. When only 

 part of the chapters of the second volume were finished, Peron 

 was compelled by ill health to give up the work, and he died in 

 December, 1810. Lesueur, to whom he had bequeathed all his 

 manuscripts, shrank from the task of going on with the history, 

 but the second volume was completed by Captain Louis Frey- 

 cinet, one of the naval officers of the expedition, and finally 

 published in 1816. An account of the voyage prepared by Le- 

 sueur's father was also published. 



After Peron's death Lesueur was no longer contented in 

 France. He desired to visit other scenes, but was restrained 

 by the fact that his father, now aged, was in need of his assist- 



