70 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



Born in 1781, in Louisiana, while it was still a Spanish colony, 

 he became, at an early age, a pupil of the famous French painter 

 David, under whose tuition he acquired the rudiments 

 of his art. Returning to America, he began the career of an ex- 

 plorer, and for over half a century his life was spent, for the 

 most part, in the forests or in the preparation of his ornitholog- 

 ical publications occasionally visiting England and France, 

 where he had many admirers. His devotion to his work was as 

 complete and self-sacrificing as that of Bowditch, the story of 

 whose translation of LaPlace has already been referred to. It 

 was a great surprise to his friends (though his own fervor did 

 not permit him to doubt) that the sale of his folio volumes was 

 sufficient to pay his printer's bills. Audubon was not a very 

 accomplished systematic zoologist, and when serious discrimi- 

 nations of species was necessary, sometimes formed alliances 

 with others. Thus Bachman became his collaborator in the 

 study of mammals, and the youthful Baird was invited by him, 

 shortly before his death in 1851, to join him in an ornithological 

 partnership. His relations with Alexander Wilson form the 

 subject of a most entertaining narration in the " Ornithological 

 Biography."* 



Thomas Nuttall [b. in Yorkshire, 1786, d.-at St. Helens, Lanca- 

 shire, Sept. 10, 1859] was so thoroughly identified with Ameri- 

 can natural history and so entirely unconnected with that of 

 England that, although he returned to his native land to die, we 

 may fairly claim him as one of our own worthies. He crossed 

 the ocean when about twenty-one years of age, and travelled in 

 every part of the United States and in the Sandwich Islands 

 studying birds and plants. From 1822 to 1828 he was curator 

 and lecturer at the Harvard Botanical Garden. Besides numer- 

 ous papers in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy, 

 he published in Philadelphia, in 1818, his " Genera of North 



* i, P. 439- 



