Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/706

688 more of Audubon. He is the greatest artist in his own walk that ever lived, and can not fail to reap the reward of his genius and perseverance and adventurous zeal in his own beautiful branch of natural history, both in fame and fortune."

was born near New Orleans, May 4, 1780, and died at the present Audubon Park, New York city, January 27, 1851. His father, the son of a fisherman of La Vendée, was a French naval officer, who, having become wealthy, had acquired a plantation in Louisiana, and married a lady of that colony, of Spanish descent. The son imbibed a love of Nature at an extremely early age, which was probably strengthened by his short residence on his father's plantation in Santo Domingo, and was not repressed, but mastered the situation when he was sent to France to be educated. It is recorded of him that he was accustomed to amuse himself when a mere child by trying to draw the birds he saw around him; and that, his crude efforts not being satisfactory, he used to make a bonfire of them at each birthday. His father desired him to be qualified for some occupation connected with the navy, or with engineering. He was sent to France, where the father had bought an estate near Nantes, on which his step-mother was living, to be taught mathematics, drawing, geography, fencing, and music. His drawing-master was the celebrated artist David, who set him to drawing "horses' heads and the limbs of giants," but he preferred birds, and improved such opportunities as he could get to exercise himself upon them, and spent much of his time in excursions into the woods, collecting specimens, and making drawings of them. The real supervision of his operations was with his indulgent step-mother, who gave him ample scope for the exercise of his own tastes. When Audubon's father returned from sea he was astonished at the large collection his son had made, and then asked what progress he had made in his other studies. The reply not being satisfactory, he took the youth in hand himself, and kept him for a year in the close study of mathematics. But every opportunity for natural history rambles was still improved. Audubon spent another year at Nantes, when he went over after having returned to America, and settled at Mill Grove, to expose the unfaithfulness of an agent whom his father had intrusted with the charge of one of his enterprises, and to consult his parents respecting marriage. During one of these residences in Nantes he is credited with having made a hundred drawings of European birds. Three specimens of these works have recently come into the hands of Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, who has described them in "The Auk." They are all drawn in a combination of crayon and water-colors, on a thin and not expensive kind of drawing-paper; are numbered 44, 77, and 96, and represent the magpie, the coot, and the green woodpecker. The earliest of the sketches is the magpie, represented as of life-size and standing on the ground. "The execution is quite crude, though the naturalist 'sticks out' in it, for,