Audubon's monumental work, now brings, in the original edition with the folio-plates, $3,000 to $4,000 in the book market. It contains far more material and better plates than Wilson's work, and differs from it strikingly in a literary way, for Audubon's style is characteristically French in its liveliness, its interjection of personal incidents, and its imaginative exaggeration. Audubon's fame as an author is based on the magnificent plates rather than on the text of his book, which is rarely quoted by modern ornithologists, most of whose writings are, however, far less entertaining. Audubon, possessing pleasing social gifts and special opportunities, obtained a contemporary publicity such as Wilson never enjoyed.
[Illustration: Photograph by courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, New York
Demonstrating his favorite subject, Radiates (corals, jelly fishes, and star-fish tribe), before a class of pupils]
A third important treatise on our birds was that by Thomas Nuttall, a quaint character in charge of the Harvard Botanical Garden, and an original author in botany. Like his predecessors he gathered his facts by traveling extensively. His two volumes are of great value, and peculiarly interesting in the matter of birds' songs.
A contemporary of Nuttall's in Philadelphia was Dr. John Godman (1794-1830), an eminent physician and anatomist, who found time to write a charming little book, "Rambles of a Naturalist," which was the earliest example of sketches of that kind issued in this country. He later prepared an illustrated "Natural History." This was the first systematic account, with engravings, of all the American mammals then known, and it contains much enjoyable and instructive reading, with good pictures.
Audubon, about 1840, projected a more pretentious work on our mammals than Godman's, the text of which was to be prepared by Dr. John Bachman of South Carolina, while Audubon and his son Victor were to draw the pictures on copper. This plan resulted in the publication, in 1847, of "Quadrupeds of North America,"--to this day an important and interesting feature of our scientific libraries.
[Illustration: From "Walden," by courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company