interesting, so I shall set to at once. I cannot, however, give scientific descriptions, and here must have assistance."
His choice of an assistant would have been his friend Mr. William Swainson, but this could not be arranged, and Mr. James Wilson recommended Mr. William MacGillivray.[1] Of this gentleman Mr. D. G. Elliot says:[2] "No better or more fortunate choice could have been made. Audubon worked incessantly, MacGillivray keeping abreast of him, and Mrs. Audubon re-wrote the entire manuscript to send to America, and secure the copyright there." The happy result of this association of two great men, so different in most respects as Audubon and MacGillivray, is characterized by Dr. Coues in the following terms ("Key to North American Birds," 2d ed., 1884, p. xxii): "Vivid and ardent was his genius, matchless he was both with pen and pencil in giving life and spirit to the beautiful objects he delineated with passionate love; but there was a strong and patient worker by his side, William MacGillivray, the countryman of Wilson, destined to lend the sturdy Scotch fibre to an Audubonian epoch.[3] The brilliant French-American Naturalist was little of a 'scientist.' Of his work the magical beauties of form and color and movement are all his; his page is redolent of Nature's fragrance; but MacGillivray's are the bone and sinew, the hidden anatomical parts beneath the lovely face, the nomenclature, the classification,—in a word, the technicalities of the science."
- ↑ There has been much question as to the spelling of MacGillivray's name, Professor Newton and most others writing it Macgillivray, but in the autograph letters we own the capital "G" is always used.
- ↑ Address at the special meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, April 26, 1893.
- ↑ Referring to one of the six "epochs" into which, in the same work, Dr. Coues divided the progress of American Ornithology. His "Audubon epoch" extends from 1824 to 1853, and one of the four periods into which this epoch is divided is the "Audubonian period," 1834-1853.
