LETTER TO WILLIAM SWA1NSON, ESQ. 513 



read the personalities you must have seen that his infatuated admirers 

 never hesitated to indulge in personalities against me. 



Audubon having given to the public an incorrect account of him- 

 self, I had a full right to comment upon that account, in order to 

 show to the readers that the wilful inaccuracies which pervaded his 

 autobiography ought to be a warning to them, how they put implicit 

 confidence in the experiments which he says he made to prove the 

 vulture's deficiency in the power of scent* You tell us that he has 

 silenced his opponents, and established in the most complete manner 

 the accuracy of his first assertion. How well he has succeeded, will 

 be seen by the note below. 



If by styling me " an Amateur" you wish your readers to under- 

 stand that I present my zoological information gratuitously to the 

 public, in contradistinction to yourself, who bring your own to the 

 market, then, indeed, the appellation might be received as a com- 

 pliment ; but, unfortunately, other passages in your work compel me 

 to view it in no other light than that of a decided sneer. 



Let me now take a cursory view of the Amateur Naturalist, and 

 then of the trading Naturalist. The reader will not fail to perceive 

 how much original information is to be acquired in the closet, and 

 how much by ranging through the boundless fields of nature. 



To say nothing of the zoological communications to be found 

 in the " Wanderings," I have presented to Mr London's invaluable 

 Magazine of Natural History above sixty papers of original 



* " William Sharp McLeay, Esq., a distinguished naturalist, and for the last 

 ten years a resident in the Island of Cuba, is now in the United States on his 

 way to London. Talking of the vulture, he said, in presence of Doctors Pickery, 

 Griffiths, Mr Titian Peale, and the writer of this, that ' Waterton is right, and 

 Audubon is in error. The Aura (vulture) is as common in Cuba as a barn-door 

 fowl, and I am intimately acquainted with its habits. It was a singular coincidence, 

 that on the very day in which I was reading the controversy, I had been examining 

 some specimens of the large serpent named Python, and had thrown the carcasses, 

 then in a state of putridity, into a remote part of the garden of my country resi- 

 dence, five miles from the Havanna, a spot so thickly shaded by mango bushes, 

 that it would have been as possible for a vulture to see through, a wall as to dis- 

 cover by sight the remains of the serpents ; and yet, in so short a time, I beheld 

 the vultures at a distance, sailing in the air, advancing towards the garden, where 

 they alighted, and regaled themselves upon the stinking Pythons.'" Extract 

 from a Utter dated Philadelphia, May 18, 1836. 



2 K 



