SIDELIGHTS ON CONTEMPORARIES 111 



them in books, and the disappointment of finding them actually 

 new. I assure you, good reader, that, even at this moment, I 

 should have less pleasure in presenting to the scientific world a 

 new bird, the knowledge of whose habits I do not possess, than 

 in describing the peculiarities of one long since discovered. 



It is a pity that Audubon did not maintain so admir- 

 able an attitude towards the description of new species 

 as was here expressed, but at the close of his career in 

 England, when he desired to make his work on Ameri- 

 can ornithology as complete as possible, he appeared as 

 keen to describe and publish new birds as any of his 

 contemporaries. 



Shortly after his return to London in the spring of 

 1831, Audubon sent Swainson the following letter with 

 a copy of the first volume of his Biography of Birds, but 

 his one-time friend was not the author of an extended 

 and impartial review of the work, which appeared in the 

 Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in the same 

 year.^^ 



"Signed "Ornlthophilus" (see Bibliography, No. 97), and attributed by 

 Coues (see Bibliography, No. 181), with a question mark, to Swainson, 

 but the internal evidence shows conclusively that he was not its author. 

 The writer of this article said that it was not enough to state that 

 Audubon "has invented a new style in the representation of natural 

 objects; for so true are his pictures, that he who has once seen and 

 examined them, can never again look with pleasure on the finest produc- 

 tions of other artists. To paint like Audubon, will henceforth mean to 

 represent Nature as she is. . . . To relieve, as Mr. Audubon says, the 

 tedium of those who may have imposed upon themselves the task of 

 following an author through the mazes of descriptive ornithology, he has 

 interspersed descriptions of American scenery and manners, gloomy forests, 

 tangled cane-brakes, dismal swamps, majestic rivers, floods, tornadoes, and 

 earthquakes; the migration of the white man, the retreat of the red; 

 the character and pursuits of the backwoodsman. . . . Much, therefore, 

 is it to be wished that Mr. Audubon would undertake the delineation of 

 the birds of Great Britain, which, with his matchless talents, aided by 

 those of Mr. Havell, would eclipse, not only all other representations of 

 these birds, but even the 'Birds of America,' unrivalled as that work 

 now is." 



