A MEETING OF RIVALS 223 
“March 23, 1810.—I bade adieu to Louisville, to which 
place I had four letters of recommendation, and was taught 
to expect much of everything there; but neither received one act 
of civility from those to whom I was recommended, one sub- 
scriber, nor one new bird; though I delivered my letters, ran- 
sacked the woods repeatedly, and visited all the characters likely 
to subscribe. Science or literature has not one friend in this 
place.” 
What actually happened at this meeting of the two 
naturalists will never be certainly known, beyond what 
can be gathered from their rather widely divergent ac- 
counts. It should be noticed, however, that the para- 
graph which Audubon quoted was extracted from Wil- 
son’s private diary; it was no doubt written on the spur 
of the moment, possibly to humor his own mood, and 
certainly with no thought of its later publication. It 
was inserted by George Ord in the biographical sketch 
of his friend appended to the ninth volume of the Amer- 
ican Ornithology, which appeared in 1814, the year after 
Wilson’s death. Audubon was not concerned, either 
directly or by implication, except in the last sentence, 
for it is evident that he was not one of those to whom 
Wilson had carried letters of introduction. Thus the 
matter stood until 1828, when Audubon’s Birds of 
America were being engraved in England. In all prob- 
ability the incident would never have been noticed by 
Audubon, had not Ord seen fit to revive it when his life 
of Wilson'* was issued as a separate volume in that 
year. In this edition of the biography Ord inserted 
fuller extracts from Wilson’s journal, with the evident 
“Sketch of the Life of Alewander Wilson, Author of the American 
Ornithology, by George Ord, F. L. S. &c. pp. i-cxcix, Philadelphia, 1828; 
taken from vol. i of an octavo edition of Wilson, edited by Ord, and issued 
by Harrison Hall, in three volumes, at Philadelphia in 1828-29, with folio 
atlas of plates reproduced from the original work; see Note 10, supra. 
