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Updated: May 7, 2025
Let us rather repeat Audubon's own remark on realising how far short his drawings came of representing the birds themselves: "After all, there's nothing perfect but primitiveness."
He would only cut off a bit of the wick with the bullet. But he would leave the candle burning. Once Audubon came near being killed by some robbers. He stopped at a cabin where lived an old white woman. He found a young Indian in the house. The Indian had hurt himself with an arrow. He had come to the house to spend the night. The old woman saw Audubon's fine gold watch.
He spent six weeks in the Great Pine Forest, and much time at Great Egg Harbor, and has given delightful accounts of these trips in his journals. Four hours' sleep out of the twenty-four was his allotted allowance. One often marvels at Audubon's apparent indifference to his wife and his home, for from the first he was given to wandering.
Wilson errs, if at all, in the other direction. His birds, on the other hand, reflect his cautious, undemonstrative Scotch nature. Few of them are shown in violent action like Audubon's cuckoo; their poses for the most part are easy and characteristic.
Bell, a tall, clean-shaven, white-haired old gentleman, as straight as an Indian, who had been a companion of Audubon's. He had a musty little shop, somewhat on the order of Mr. Venus's shop in "Our Mutual Friend," a little shop in which he had done very valuable work for science.
There is a hopeless confusion as to certain important dates in Audubon's life. He was often careless and unreliable in his statements of matters of fact, which weakness during his lifetime often led to his being accused of falsehood.
Practically all his long and distinguished career was spent as a professor in Harvard University. Another purchase of this period, probably the first acquisition for the library, which seems curiously extravagant for the officers of an "incipient" University, was Audubon's "Birds of America."
On the Peregrine Falcon, Mr. Blyth, in Charlesworth's 'Mag. of Nat. Hist. vol. i. 1837, p. 304. On Dicrurus, 'Ibis, 1863, p. 44. On the Platalea, 'Ibis, vol. vi. 1864, p. 366. On the Bombycilla, Audubon's 'Ornitholog. Biography, vol. i. p. 229. On the Palaeornis, see, also, Jerdon, 'Birds of India, vol. i. p. 263.
But the man, Audubon says, knew nothing of the subjects he was supposed to teach, and was, besides, "a covetous wretch, who did all he could to ruin my father, and, indeed, swindled both of us to a large amount." Da Costa pushed his authority so far as to object to Audubon's proposed union with Lucy Bakewell, as being a marriage beneath him, and finally plotted to get the young man off to India.
This trip was undertaken mainly in the interests of the "Quadrupeds and Biography of American Quadrupeds," and much of what he saw and did is woven into those three volumes. The trip lasted eight months, and the hardships and exposures seriously affected Audubon's health. He returned home in October, 1843.
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