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 



22 Albert Giinther, loc. cit. 



