JOHN JAMES AUDUBON. ^3 



Brunswick and the shores of the Bay of Funday, and then 

 went by schooner to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Magdalen 

 Islands, and the coast of Labrador ; and in the latter part of 

 the season visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. In the en- 

 suing spring, after nearly three years of travel and research, 

 he went for the third time to England, where, and in Edin- 

 burgh, he lived a year and a half. As soon as the first volume 

 of the Birds was published, Audubon began his Ornithological 

 Biographies, to accompany it ; a work which, besides descrip- 

 tions of the birds, contained reminiscences of personal adven- 

 ture, with delineations of scenery and character. It was com- 

 pleted in five volumes (i83i-'39). It has a literary and his- 

 torical value apart from that which the accounts of the birds 

 give it, in that it presents in language warm from his having 

 been a part of the scenes, a virgin past of our country, and its 

 forests and prairies, which can never be restored or so well de- 

 scribed again. In the scientific part of this work he had the 

 valuable co-operation of Mr. William McGillivray, of Edin- 

 burgh. Having spent the winter of i836-'37 at Charleston, 

 with excursions to the Sea Islands, Savannah, and Florida, Au- 

 dubon, in the spring of 1837, sailed in a revenue cutter for 

 explorations in the Gulf of Mexico, of which he has left 

 sketches of scenes in the Louisiana bayous, and in Texas. In 

 1838 he returned to Edinburgh, where he spent several months 

 in preparing the fourth and fifth volumes of the Ornithologi- 

 cal Biographies and in finishing the drawings for the Birds. 



In 1839 Audubon came back to the United States for 

 the last time, bought an estate on the banks of the Hudson 

 River, which he called Minniesland now Audubon Park, in 

 the city of New York and engaged in the preparation of an 

 edition of the Birds in volumes of a reduced size. In this edi- 

 tion the matter was classified, a feature which had not been 

 found practicable in the method of publication of the original 

 edition. He had also had in hand for some time a book on 

 the Quadrupeds of America, for which he, his sons, Victor 

 Gilford and John Woodhouse Audubon, and the father-in-law 

 of his sons, the Rev. John Bachman, of Charleston, South 

 Carolina, had gathered much material. Mr. Bachman took 

 the same relation to this book that Mr. McGillivray had taken 

 to the Ornithological Biographies. A trip to the Rocky 

 Mountains had been planned in connection with this work, but 



