DEBUT AS A NATURALIST 329 
nature herself. Ord, as we have seen, had edited the 
eighth and written the ninth, or concluding, volume of 
Wilson’s American Ornithology, as well as a life of its 
author; the appearance of a new star in the ornithologi- 
cal horizon may not have been a welcome sight. At 
all events, we soon find him engaged upon a new edition 
of Wilson’s work. Ord had objected to Audubon’s 
method of combining plants and other accessories with 
his drawings of birds, a criticism that in the case of 
purely technical works could be easily sustained, and 
some of his later charges, though carried too far, were 
not wholly without foundation.® 
Bonaparte,* on the other hand, was captivated by 
*This was the third edition of the American Ornithology, issued by 
Messrs. Collins & Company in New York and by Harrison Hall of Phila- 
delphia, in three octavo volumes, with an atlas of 76 plates colored by 
hand, in 1828-9. Mr. Hall, who appears to have been the person most 
interested financially in this edition, was a brother of James Hall, author 
of a notorious review in which this work was praised at the expense of 
Audubon, who was viciously attacked (see Bibliography, No. 123). Friends 
of Audubon repeatedly asserted that as soon as his popularity and success 
began to check the sales of Wilson’s work, Ord and a few others, aided by 
interested publishers, began a systematic series of attacks, some notice of 
which is taken in Chapter XXVIII. 
3See Chapter XIV. 
*Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, Prince of Canino and 
Musignano, the eldest son of Lucien, and nephew of Napoleon, Bonaparte, 
was born at Paris in 1803, and died there in 1857. At this time he 
was settled with his uncle and father-in-law, Joseph Bonaparte, former King 
of Spain, at Philadelphia, and there and at Bordentown, New Jersey, 
where Joseph had an estate, he undertook the study of American birds. 
His best known scientific works are: American Ornithology, or the Natural 
History of the Birds of the United States, not Given by Wilson, 4 volumes, 
quarto, with 27 colored plates, Philadelphia, 1825-1833; and Iconographica 
della Fauna Italica, Rome, 1833-1841. In 1828 he retired to Italy, where 
he was devoted to literary and scientific pursuits. He was an early sub- 
scriber to Audubon’s Birds of America, but their relations were somewhat 
strained on the publication of the Ornithological Biography in 1831 (see 
Chapter XXIX). Bonaparte later entered politics in Italy, and was 
leader of the republican party at Rome in 1848 and 1849; after having been 
expelled from France by the order of Louis Napoleon, he was permitted 
to return in 1850, and became director of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. 
He was a closet naturalist rather than a field student, but did much 
for the reform of nomenclature. In his Ornithology the number of American 
birds was raised to 366, nearly one hundred having been added since the 
