330 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
Audubon’s drawings and anxious to secure his services 
for his own work, then well in hand. This was the 
American Ornithology, for which Titian R. Peale was 
then making the drawings, and Thomas Lawson, who 
had been Wilson’s engraver, was engaged on the plates; 
though quite distinct in itself, this was much in the style 
of Wilson’s earlier work, of which it was virtually a 
continuation. When Bonaparte introduced Audubon 
to these men, it is not surprising that the meeting was 
not productive of the best of feeling on either side. 
Peale’s stiff and rather conventional portraits of birds 
naturally failed to awaken enthusiasm in “the trader 
naturalist,” as some who looked upon him as a rival 
rather contemptuously called him. The interview with 
Lawson, if correctly reported by his friend,’ shows that 
his interest could not have been of the most disinterested 
sort. “Lawson told me,” said this reporter, “that he 
spoke freely of the pictures, and said that they were ill 
drawn, not true to nature, and anatomically incorrect.” 
Thereupon Bonaparte defended them warmly, saying 
that he would buy them and that Lawson should en- 
grave them. “You may buy them,” said the Scotchman, 
“but I will not engrave them . . . because ornithology 
requires truth in the forms, and correctness in the lines. 
Here are neither.” Other meetings are said to have fol- 
lowed, but to have ended only in mutual dislike. Never- 
theless, one of Audubon’s drawings was engraved by 
Lawson and appeared in Bonaparte’s work,® but most 
work of Wilson was revised by Ord, but he added only two that were 
new, Cooper’s Hawk, (Accipiter cooperi), named after William Cooper of 
New York, and Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya), dedicated to Thomas Say, and 
first procured by Titian R. Peale in the Rocky Mountain districts of the 
Far West. Perhaps his most important technical work, the Conspectus 
Generum Avium, begun in 1850, was incomplete at the time of his death. 
5 William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of 
Design in the United States (Bibl. No. 59), vol. ii, p. 402 (New York, 1834). 
®°The Boat-tailed Grackle, vol. i, plate iv. 
