Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time. Vol. 1 (of 2)Herrick, Francis Hobart
History
Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time. Vol. 1 (of 2)
Herrick, Francis Hobart
Audubon, John James, 1785-1851
In this fuller record we learn that Wilson spent five days in
Louisville; he examined Audubon's drawings on Monday, March 19, hunted
alone on the 20th, went out shooting with Audubon on the 21st, and
finally left Louisville on the morning of the 23d; no record was
admitted by Ord for Sunday, the 18th, or for the 22d, a Thursday. Wilson
noticed the drawings of two new _Motacillæ_, or Warblers, in Audubon's
collection, and it would have been only natural that he should have
felt a strong desire to copy them, yet not a word was said about the
loan of drawings to which Audubon refers; Wilson merely stated that
from those to whom he was recommended he had received not "one act of
civility,—one subscriber, nor one new bird." Audubon was evidently
regarded as one of the "many shopkeepers" who boarded "in taverns,"
and not as a "naturalist," for Wilson said that he had none to keep him
company, and it is rather significant that Audubon's name is not once
mentioned in his _Ornithology_.
Twenty-nine years after Wilson's visit to Louisville, when Audubon came
to publish the fifth and last volume of his _Ornithological Biography_,
he maintained that Wilson had copied his drawing of a certain bird,
called the Small-headed Flycatcher,[195] without any acknowledgment. To
quote Audubon's words:
When Alexander Wilson visited me at Louisville, he found
in my already large collection of drawings, a figure of the
present species, which being at that time unknown to him he
copied and afterwards published in his great work, but without
acknowledging the privilege that had thus been granted to
him. I have more than once regretted this, not by any means
so much on my own account as for the sake of one to whom we
are so deeply indebted for the elucidation of our ornithology.
This troublesome bird was first described by Wilson in 1812, when he
rightly pronounced it "very rare," and said that the specimen from
which his drawing was made had been shot in an orchard, presumably
near Philadelphia, on the twenty-fourth day of April, and that several
had been obtained also in New Jersey. His friend Ord, who came to his
defense in 1840, confirmed this statement by declaring to the American
Philosophical Society of Philadelphia that he had been with Wilson on
the day in question and had examined the specimen. Lawson also affirmed
that in engraving the plate he had worked directly from the bird which
Wilson had given him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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