AUDUBON, the first great student of nature born in North America, had a delicate sense of the beautiful, and he gave it expression in semi-poetical prose which is often excellent as literature, in spite of the obvious influence Dr. Samuel Johnson and his school were then exercising on American prose. In spite of their Latinisms, such sketches and essays as those on “The Mocking Bird,” “The Humming Bird,” and “The Wood Thrush” are not likely to lose the popularity they have long enjoyed.

  Audubon was born near New Orleans. Educated in France, he studied art under the celebrated painter David, gaining thus the skill which gave a world-wide and enduring celebrity to his “Birds of America,” the greatest achievement of its kind in the history of scientific research. His “Ornithological Biography,” which was published from 1831 to 1839 in five volumes, is the source of much from his pen that has gained general circulation. His “Birds of America”—the result of his explorations of a continent which everywhere, except on the Atlantic coast, was then almost a wilderness—was published (1827–39) by subscription at $1,000 a copy. He died at New York, January 27th, 1851. “The Quadrupeds of America,” the final sheets of which were printed in 1854, is not wholly his work.