Audubon the Naturalist
A History of his Life and Time (Complete)
9781465625847
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is more than three-quarters of a century since Audubon's masterpiece, The Birds of America, was completed, and two generations have occupied the stage since the "American Woodsman" quietly passed away at his home on the Hudson River. These generations have seen greater changes in the development and application of natural science and in the spread of scientific knowledge among men than all those which preceded them. Theories of nature come and go but the truth abides, and Audubon's "book of Nature," represented by his four massive volumes of hand-engraved and hand-colored plates, still remains "the most magnificent monument which has yet been raised to ornithology," as Cuvier said of the parts which met his astonished gaze in 1828; while his graphic sketches of American life and scenery and his vivid portraits of birds, drawn with the pen, can be read with as much pleasure as when the last volume of his Ornithological Biography left the press in 1839. This appears the more remarkable when we reflect that Audubon's greatest working period, from 1820 to 1840, belonged essentially to the eighteenth century, for the real transition to the nineteenth century did not begin in England before 1837; then came the dawn of the newer day that was to witness those momentous changes in communication and travel, in education, democracy and ideas, which characterize life in the modern world. When Audubon left London for Paris on September 1, 1828, it took him four days by coach, boat and diligence to reach the French capital, a journey which in normal times is now made in less than eight hours. Mail then left the Continent for England on but four days in the week, and to post a single letter cost twenty-four sous. Writing at Edinburgh a little earlier (December 21, 1826), Audubon recorded that on that day he had received from De Witt Clinton and Thomas Sully, in America, letters in answer to his own, in forty-two days, and added that it seemed absolutely impossible that the distance could be covered so rapidly. This was indeed remarkable, since the first vessel to cross the Atlantic wholly under its own steam, in 1838, required seventeen days to make the passage from New York to Queenstown. "Walking in Paris," said Audubon in 1828, "is disagreeable in the extreme; the streets are paved, but with scarcely a sidewalk, and a large gutter filled with dirty black water runs through the middle of each, and people go about without any kind of order, in the center, or near the houses." The Paris of that day contained but one-fourth the number of its present population. Having reaped the fruits of the Revolution, it was enjoying peace under the Restoration; moreover, it was taking a leading part in the advancement of natural science, of which Cuvier was the acknowledged dean. It was but a year before the death of blind and aged Lamarck, neglected and forgotten then, but destined after the lapse of three-quarters of a century to have a monument raised to his memory by contributions from every part of Europe and America, and to be recognized as the first great evolutionist of the modern school.
