PROCEEDINGS—PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. XXVII 
of Louisiana, on 4th May, 1780. His father was a Frenchman, of 
a roving disposition, who had been sent out into the world to seek 
his fortune, without any resources, at the early age of twelve years. 
From being a boy before the mast, in a vessel trading between France 
and America, the elder Audubon gradually rose until he became a 
Commander in the French Navy under the first Napoleon. During 
one of his visits to America he had purchased an estate in what was 
then the French Colony of Louisiana, and it was here that he met 
and married his wife, a lady of Spanish extraction, and settled down 
for a few years, during which the future Naturalist was born. The 
scene of Audubon’s earliest years was thus laid amid the orange 
groves which fringe the heated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and in 
after years he could still recall the feelings of wonder and delight 
with which he had there first heard the call of the mocking-bird, and 
watched the bright plumage of many other members of the feathered 
tribe. Soon, however, the family removed to the Island of St. 
Domingo, in the West Indies, of which Commodore Audubon had 
been appointed Governor. Here Madame Audubon lost her life 
during an insurrection of the Negro population, and shortly after, 
Audubon, senior, with his daughter and three sons, returned to his 
native France, where he purchased an estate near Nantes, on the 
Loire, and settled down to spend the remainder of his days. 
The next few years of Audubon’s life were spent in completing 
his education, or at least such education as his wandering disposition 
allowed him to pick up, for, like many another man who has made 
himself famous, he preferred to learn of things rather than of books. 
His father wished him to prepare for a military training, in order that 
he might enter the victorious armies of Napoleon, but again and 
again, when he should have been studying mathematics, he was 
found in the woods and meadows by the Loire watching the habits 
of some curious insect or making drawings of the different birds. 
At last his father saw that his free spirit would never submit to be 
curbed by the discipline of a soldier’s life, and sent him, instead, to 
America to look after the estates which he had purchased there. 
At first he settled at Mill Grove, a little country place in the State 
of Pennsylvania. It was here he met with Lucy Bakewell, the 
daughter of an English settler, who afterwards became his wife, and 
who was his sympathetic helpmate in all his subsequent trials and 
difficulties, as well as in his successes, when these came at last. The 
few years spent at Mill Grove by the young couple were perhaps the 
happiest they ever experienced. Their life was unconventional in 
the extreme, and if their means were slender their wants were equally 
limited. Much of Audubon’s time was spent in hunting and sketch¬ 
ing in the neighbouring woods, for already he had begun to dream of 
a great work on the Natural History of his adopted country, though 
without any definite plan as yet. At length, however, the necessities 
of his young family compelled him to seek some more remunerative 
channel for his energies. Impelled partly by this necessity, but still 
more by his own restless disposition and his insatiable craving for 
more knowledge of nature and her ways, he now commenced that series 
of wanderings—or “vagabondizings,” as he termed them—which con- 
