now her Mitchells, Harlans, and Charles
Bonapartes, have repaid with interest the debt which she owed to Europe.
The history of the American birds by Wilson, already equals in elegance
our most beautiful works in ornithology, and if ever that of Audubon be
completed, it will have to be confessed that in magnificence of
execution the Old World is surpassed by the New." The work of the
"American backwoodsman" thus alluded to, has long been completed; the
great Cuvier subsequently acknowledged it to be "the most splendid
monument which art has erected in honor of ornithology;" and the
judgment of mankind has placed the name of our countryman first in the
list of authors and artists who have illustrated the beautiful branch of
natural history to which he has devoted so large a portion of his long
and heroic life.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON was born in Louisiana about the year 1782. He was of
French descent, and his parents perceiving early the bent of his genius
sent him to Paris to pursue his education. While there he attended
schools of natural history and the arts, and in drawing took lessons
from the celebrated David. He returned in his eighteenth year, and his
father soon after gave him a farm near Philadelphia, where the
Perkioming creek falls into the Schuylkill. Its fine woods offered him
numerous subjects for his pencil, and he here commenced that series of
drawings which ultimately swelled into the magnificent collection of The
Birds of America. Here too he was married, and here was born his eldest
son. He engaged in commercial speculations, but was not successful. His
love for the fields and flowers, the forests and their winged
inhabitants, we readily suppose unfitted him for trade. At the end of
ten years he removed to the west. There were then no steamboats on the
Ohio, and few villages and no cities on its shores. Reaching that noble
river in the warm days of autumn, he purchased a small boat in which,
with his wife and child and two rowers, he leisurely pursued his way
down to Henderson, in Kentucky, where his family resided several years.
He appears at first to have engaged in commerce, for he mentions his
meeting with Wilson, of whom till then he had never heard, as having
occurred in his counting-room in Louisville in the spring of 1810. His
great predecessor was procuring subscriptions for his work. He called on
Audubon, explained the nature of his occupations, and requested his
patronage. The merchant was surp