Audubon's Ornithology^ First Volume. 345 



was resting upon it, been enabled to awaken public opinion to 

 the subject, and by almost a single stride to place the study of 

 natural history in that elevated rank to which it properly belongs, 

 but from which it had been forever before shut out by prejudices 

 as unfounded as they were narrow and contracted. 



It is not our present purpose to point oat the steps by which, 

 nor enumerate those through whose agency, this radical change 

 in ihe public mind has, with unexampled rapidity, taken place ; 

 but we cannot forbear to point to one whose efforts in the cause 

 have been preeminent, and whose success has been without ex- 

 ample. Our readers hardly need be told we refer to George Cu- 

 vier. By his labors as a naturalist — by arranging, in a manner 

 never before equalled, the objects of his research, by displaying 

 at one view the wonders of the remotest ages, and of the most 

 distant portions of the earth, — as the public lecturer who carried 

 away with him his audience, by the variety of his illustrations, the 

 vividness of his descriptions, and the fascination of his eloquence, 

 , — as the philosophical writer, by his powers of combination and 

 analysis, by his classification of what was insulated, by giving 

 system and unity to the most desultory fragments of natural sci- 

 ence, by establishing new laws, by opening new fields of research, 

 by throwing the light of his genius over the darkest pages of 

 nature, — in fine, by a whole life devoted to that object, he carried 

 away captive the intelligence of a whole people, and an almost 

 universal acquiescence on the part of his countrymen in favor of 

 his darling studies. The change in public opinion in favor of 

 the natural sciences, then progressing slowly and with uncertain 

 steps, received an impetus at his hands which carried it onward 

 at a rapid rate, and which has since continued without intermis- 

 sion, and in spite of the scoffs and the sneers of the ignorant, the 

 doubting shrug of the short-sighted, or the illiberal cui bono of 

 him whose contracted vision looks only to immediate advantage, 

 and the dimness of whose sight will not enable him to discern 

 the remote, but not on that account less certain advantages which 

 accrue to him who opens, in a proper spirit, the great book of 

 nature, every page of which speaks to him so plainly of nature's 

 great Originator. 



The day has now gone by when the field naturalist, whose 

 days are spent in roaming in search of ornithological specimens, 

 and whose gun is his inseparable and perhaps only companion, is 



