AUDUBON 
NATURALIST 
CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 
Audubon’s growing fame—Experience in Paris in 1828—Cuvier’s patron- 
age—Audubon’s publications—His critics—His talents and accom- 
plishments—His Americanism and honesty of purpose—His foibles 
and faults—Appreciations and monuments—The Audubon Societies— 
Biographies and autobiography—Robert Buchanan and the true his- 
tory of his Life of Audubon. 
It is more than three-quarters of a century since 
Audubon’s masterpiece, The Birds of America, was 
completed, and two generations have occupied the stage 
since the “American Woodsman” quietly passed away 
at his home on the Hudson River. These generations 
have seen greater changes in the development and ap- 
plication of natural science and in the spread of sci- 
entific knowledge among men than all those which pre- 
ceded them. Theories of nature come and go but the 
truth abides, and Audubon’s “book of Nature,” repre- 
sented by his four massive volumes of hand-engraved 
and hand-colored plates, still remains “the most mag- 
nificent monument which has yet been raised to ornithol- 
ogy,” as Cuvier said of the parts which met his aston- 
ished gaze in 1828; while his graphic sketches of Ameri- 
can life and scenery and his vivid portraits of birds, 
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