A MEETING OF RIVALS 213 
little later in the same month we find him appealing to 
Bartram for exact names, when he writes: 
I send for your amusement a few attempts at some of our 
indigenous birds, hoping that your good nature will excuse their 
deficiencies, while you point them out tome... . They were 
chiefly coloured by candle-light. I have now got my collection 
of native birds considerably enlarged, and shall endeavor, if 
possible, to obtain all the smaller ones this summer. Be pleased 
to mark on the drawings, with a pencil, the names of each bird, 
as, except three or four, I do not know them. 
Wilson, practically self-taught in everything, with 
fingers stiffened by the hard labor of his hands, thus 
began at the age of thirty-eight to make his drawings 
of birds, before he knew the names of his subjects, and 
twenty years before Audubon’s talents were known to 
any but members of his own family and a few intimate 
friends. The only aid in drawing which Wilson ever 
received appears to have come from the hints which 
Lawson supplied. Nevertheless, the best of Alexander 
Wilson’s original drawings represent a degree of ex- 
cellence and honest workmanship of which he had no 
need to be ashamed, and in many instances he owed 
far less to his engraver, Alexander Lawson, than did 
his great rival to Robert Havell. 
In 1880 Dr. Elliott Coues examined a large collection 
of original Wilson and Audubon drawings and manu- 
scripts, “owned and kept with the greed of a genuine 
bibliomaniac” by Joseph M. Wade, then editor of Fa- 
miliar Science and Fancier’s Journal. If not Wilson’s 
portfolio itself, its contents, at least, said Dr. Coues, 
were then in Mr. Wade’s possession, and this series of 
Wilson’s drawings included, he thought, more than half 
