94 
NATURE NOTES 
mouth large with good lips ; teeth few, blunted by age, excepting one in the 
lower jaw measuring nearly three quarters of an inch square. Thus have I 
described Cuvier almost as if a new species of man.” 
He was invited by Cuvier to dine with him on the following 
Saturday at six. Accordingly on Saturday, September 6, we find 
this entry : — 
“ We proceeded after dressing to Baron Cuvier's house to dine, and were 
received by the Baron who presented us to his only remaining daughter. . . . 
As I seldom go anywhere without meeting some one who has met me I found 
among the guests a Fellow of the Linnean Society who knew me well — Captain 
Parry — . . . . and M. Lesson, just returned from a voyage round the world.” 
A week later : — 
September 13. — “ I had to take my portfolio to Baron Cuvier, and I went first to 
M. Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, who liked it much, and retracted his first opinion of 
the work being too large. . . . Cuvier pronounced it the finest of its kind 
in existence.” 
Further on we get a glimpse of the apartments in Cuvier’s 
house, eight rooms filled with books, and a sort of laboratory, 
his sanctum sanctorum, in which he was found looking at a small 
lizard in a tiny vial filled with spirit. Audubon writes of this 
visit : — 
“ I see now his sparkling eye, half closed, as if quizzing its qualities, and as 
he put it down he wrote its name on a label. 
He was then about to sit to Parker for his portrait. Re- 
clining in a comfortable arm-chair he was 
“clad in an old green surtout, a neckcloth that might well surround his body 
if unfolded, loosely tied about his chin, and his silver locks like those of a man 
more bent on studying books than on visiting barbers, llis fine eyes shot fire 
from under his bushy eyebrows, and he smiled as he conversed with me.” 
We have dwelt so long on these portraits of celebrities that 
not much space remains in which to do justice to what follows. 
The “European Journals” are followed by the “Labrador 
Journal ” (1833), descriptive of a voyage, long planned, to the 
coast of Labrador for the purpose of procuring birds and making 
drawings for the continuation of his great work. Here we might 
expect to find some allusion to the Great Auk which had a noted 
breeding haunt on Funk Island, off Newfoundland, and, at that 
time, was not yet extinct. In this, however, we are disappointed. 
His only allusion to this bird in the two volumes before us occurs 
in his “ Missouri River Journals” (vol. ii., p. 1 3 1 ), where, under 
date August 5, 1843, he writes of the bison, “ There is even 
now a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before 
many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared.” 
Some years previously (1838), he had noted in his Ornitholo- 
gical Biography (p. 316), that Mr. Henry Havell while on a 
voyage from New York to England hooked a Great Auk on the 
bank of Newfoundland in extremely boisterous weather, and 
also that when he himself was visiting the Coast of Labrador, 
the fishermen stated that the Great Auk still bred upon a low 
