226 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
dently regarded as one of the “many shopkeepers” who 
boarded ‘in taverns,” and not as a “naturalist,” for 
Wilson said that he had none to keep him company, and 
it is rather significant that Audubon’s name is not once 
mentioned in his Ornithology. 
Twenty-nine years after Wilson’s visit to Louisville, 
when Audubon came to publish the fifth and last volume 
of his Ornithological Biography, he maintained that 
Wilson had copied his drawing of a certain bird, called 
the Small-headed Flycatcher,’* without any acknowl- 
edgment. To quote Audubon’s words: 
When Alexander Wilson visited me at Louisville, he found 
in my already large collection of drawings, a figure of the 
present species, which being at that time unknown to him 
he copied and afterwards published in his great work, but 
without acknowledging the privilege that had thus been granted 
to him. I have more than once regretted this, not by any 
means so much on my own account as for the sake of one to 
whom we are so deeply indebted for the elucidation of our 
ornithology. 
This troublesome bird was first described by Wilson 
in 1812, when he rightly pronounced it “very rare,” and 
said that the specimen from which his drawing was 
made had been shot in an orchard, presumably near 
Philadelphia, on the twenty-fourth day of April, and 
that several had been obtained also in New Jersey. 
His friend Ord, who came to his defense in 1840, con- 
firmed this statement by declaring to the American 
Philosophical Society of Philadelphia that he had been 
with Wilson on the day in question and had examined 
* Musicapa minuta, which appears in Figure 5, Plate 50, of volume vi 
of Wilson’s American Ornithology (pp. 62-63 of the text), and in Figure 2, 
Plate ccccxxxiv, of Audubon’s Birds of America (Ornithological Biography, 
vol. v, pp. 291-3). 
