STYLE OF THE COLLABORATORS 71 
were in advance of all other ornithologists of that 
time. 
With regard to Audubon’s capacity for scholarly 
composition, he certainly underrated it, as much of 
the writing in his journal is admirable in style_ 
frequently strikingly picturesque, and glowing with 
poetic inspiration. 
MacGillivray s style is always strictly correct, 
without any affectation of elegance, and it never 
fails in clearness of thought, or in the choice of 
the most aptly expressive language, while, like 
Audubon, he also shows no small measure of poetic 
inspiration and artistic instinct. He was, besides, 
the accomplished scientist. 
The joint work Ornithological Biographies was 
at once begun. “ Audubon worked incessantly, 
MacGillivray keeping abreast of him, while Mrs 
Audubon rewrote the entire manuscript to send to 
America in order to secure the copyright there.” 
So said Mr D. G. Elliot, in an address to the New 
York Academy of Sciences in 1893 ; while Dr 
Coues, in his Key to North American Birds , writes : 
Vivid and ardent was Mr Audubon’s genius, 
matchless he was, both in pen and pencil, in giving 
life and spirit to the beautiful objects he delineated 
with passionate love. . . . His page is redolent of 
Nature s fragrance, but MacGillivray’s are the bone 
and sinew, the hidden anatomical parts beneath the 
lovely form, the nomenclature, the classification—in 
a word, the technicalities of the science.” 
The relationship thus established between these 
