AUDUBON AND BOONE. 125 
zard, cocca, trache, and bronchi. On the ignited clay cast- 
ings of a buffalo you have laid the body, and it is now almost 
ready to satisfy the longing of your stomach, as it hisses in 
its oderous sap. The brook at your feet affords the very best 
drink that nature can supply, and I need not wish you better 
fare than that before you. 
Next morning you find yourself refreshed and reinvigor- 
ated, more ardent than ever, for success fails not to excite the 
desire of those who have entered upon the study of nature. 
You have packed your bird’s skin flat in your box, rolled up 
your drawing round those previously made, and now, day 
after day, you push through thick and thin, sometimes with 
success, and sometimes without; but you at last return with 
such a load on your shoulders as I have often carried on 
mine. Having once more reached the settlements, you relieve 
your tired limbs by mounting a horse, and at length gaining 
a city, find means of publishing the results of your journey. 
It requires very little exertion of fancy to see in this a 
felicitous sketch of his own mode of “ransacking the woods, 
the shores, and the barren grounds.” 
It is just such hardy methods wherein consist the immea- 
surable superiority of Mr. Audubon over the whole school of 
stuffed-specimen delineators, whose indigestible crudities and 
wretched figures have proven the very night-mare of Natural 
Science in the Old World. 
The idea of mounting knapsack and gun,’and trudging 
thousands of miles through brake and morass, over “sands, 
shores, and desert wildernesses,” encountering and braving 
the “imminence” of many perils, exposed to all “the spite 
of wreakful elements,”’ purely for love of nature, and scientifie 
accuracy, would have set one of these philosophical amateurs 
to shuddering. ‘To bespatter black coat and silken hose, get 
half starved, and catch a death cold in “ collecting materials,” 
were simply preposterous—when the Zoological gardens are 
elose at hand, and the museums are filled with specimens. 
