In 1839, having returned for the last time to his native country and established himself with his family near the city of New-York, Audubon commenced the publication of The Birds of America in imperial octavo volumes, of which the seventh and last was issued in the summer of 1844. The plates in this edition, reduced from his larger illustrations, were engraved and colored in the most admirable manner by Mr. Bowen of Philadelphia, under the direction of the author, and excepting The Birds of America in folio, there has never been published so magnificent a work on ornithology. Audubon was too sincere a worshipper of nature to be content with inglorious repose, even after having accomplished in action more than was ever dreamed of by any other naturalist; and while the "edition for the people" of his Birds of America was in course of publication, he was busy amid the forests and prairies, the reedy swamps of our southern shores, the cliffs that protect our eastern coasts, by the currents of the Mexican gulf and the tide streams of the Bay of Fundy, with his sons, Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, making the drawings and writing the biographies of the _Quadrupeds of America_, a work in no respect inferior to that on our birds, which he began to publish about five years ago. The plates, on double imperial folio paper, engraved and colored by Mr. Bowen after the original drawings made from nature by Audubon and his sons, are even more magnificent than those of the Birds of America, which twenty years ago delighted and astonished the naturalists of Europe. The Biography of American Quadrupeds, accompanying these plates, and of which the first volume appeared in New-York in 1846, was written principally by the Rev. John Bachman, D.D., of Charleston, a long-tried and enthusiastic friend, of whose introduction to him Audubon thus speaks in the preface of the second volume of his Ornithological Biography: