36 MEMORIAL TRIBUTE 



pen and pencil, in giving life and spirit to the beautiful 

 objects he delineated with passionate love ; but there 

 was a strong and patient worker by his side, William 

 MacGillivray, the countryman of Wilson, destined to 

 lend the strong Scotch fibre to the Audubonian 

 epoch. The brilliant French - American naturalist 

 was little of a scientist. Of his work, the magical 

 beauties of form and colour and movement are all 

 his ; his page is redolent of nature's fragrance ; but 

 MacGillivray's are the bone and sinew, the hidden 

 anatomical parts beneath the lovely form, the nomen- 

 clature, the classification, in a word the technicalities 

 of the science." 



Mrs. Audubon, writing from Edinburgh to her 

 sons in America, says : " Nothing is heard but the 

 steady movement of the pen ; your father is up and at 

 work before dawn, and writes without ceasing all day. 

 Mr. MacGillivray breakfasts at nine each morning, 

 attending the Museum four days in the week, has 

 several works on hand besides ours, and is, moreover, 

 engaged as a lecturer in a new seminary on botany 

 and natural history. His own work progresses slowly 

 but surely." The date of this letter does not appear, 

 but it could not have been written during Mac- 

 Gillivray's earlier years as conservator of the Museum, 

 as he must then have been fully occupied more than 

 four days a week with the arduous and anxious work 

 connected with the removal and subsequent rearrange- 

 ment of the museum contents. In 1833, and again in 

 1834, he had, as already mentioned, obtained the 



