When William Swainson brought to a close his labors on the _Cabinet Cyclopædia_ in 1840, a part of the eleventh volume was devoted to a biography of naturalists.[107] In this little work Audubon was accorded a page, Alexander Wilson received eight, while the author devoted fourteen pages to himself. The talented MacGillivray, whose memorable _History of British Birds_ had then advanced to its third volume, was studiously ignored, and was referred to only in a footnote as "Mr. Gilvray"; but he was of necessity a sharer in the following criticism of Audubon's _Biography of Birds_: "a want of precision in his descriptions, and a general ignorance of modern ornithology sadly disappoint the scientific reader." The technical descriptions in that work were written, as Swainson must have known, by his young rival, William MacGillivray, then one of the ablest exponents of the anatomy of birds in Great Britain; but anatomy, the master key to relationship, Swainson affected to regard with contempt, though overzealous friends had compared him with Cuvier, one of the greatest masters of anatomy of all time. To follow the comment of a later critic,[108] Swainson probably regarded the title of "the British Cuvier" as rather derogatory, since he had pronounced Cuvier to have been "totally unacquainted with the very first principles of the natural system." To Swainson, however, as the same commentator explains, "the natural system" implied the concept of a magical number and a circle, ideas which Cuvier would have been the first to repudiate or ignore. The ardent MacGillivray was naturally scornful of Swainson's unscientific attitude, which he had roundly scored in the introduction to his _History of British Birds_ that had begun to appear in 1837; he then said that Swainson could exclaim: "How superficially do we study nature," while in anatomy his own studies were a century behind the times and his opinions on the subject worthy of the Dark Ages. In his biographical notice of Audubon, Swainson refers to their Paris experience in the following words: It is singular how two minds, possessing the same tastes, can be so diversified, as to differ _in toto_ respecting the very same objects. During the whole of Mr. Audubon's residence in Paris, he only visited the Ornithological Gallery twice, (where I was studying for hours, almost daily), for the purpose of calling upon me; and even then he merely bestowed that sort of passing glance at the magnificent cases of birds, which a careless observer would do while sauntering in the room.