AUDUBON•S ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY. THIS delightful book combines in itself the
two rare characteristics of the natural historian—a minutely exact description of form, and a striking account of the habits, appearance, peculiarities, and we may say, as AUDUBON displays them, the very manners of birds. What is more than even these qualities, the work is original. It is not a book made from books, or from materials expressly col- lected by correspondents. AUDUBON is his own collector and his own observer. To his beloved pursuit he has devoted his life, and thrown his own soul into it. The solitudes of the forests, swamps, and prairies of the United States and the Canadas, the dreary wastes or stupendous precipices of Labrador, have been to him a home and a dwelling-place, where he worshipped science rather like a devotee of the primitive age than the good easy believers of our own times. The effect of these hard and perilous bat exciting labours. are not only felt in the information collected, but in the manner of conveying it. The Ornithological Biography has neither the heavir,esa of a second-hand account, nor the mea- sured composition, the brilliant eloquence, and the skilful group. mg and exaggeration a the mere historian. AUDUBON is, like the nature he studies and describes, "ever charming, ever new." Ills taste in expression may sometimes vergeon the theatrical, his descriptions may frequently appear enthusiastic; but they are never tiresome, and they carry with them an air of truth. Fronz severer authors he differs as life differs from the statue: he wants: the exact proportion and polished dignity of the marble, but gives. instead, something of the colour, animation, and vigour of the living: and breathing creature. Birds, however, are not all that the volume contains. An In- troduction gives us a few leaves out of Aunueolv's Autobiogmphy many of his "experiences" are scattered up and down the book. In his various pilgrimages, he saw much and heard much both of nature and of mun : squatters, lutnberers, and the various persons who live on the very boundaries of civilization, were frequently his only companions. The scenes, the incidents, the social pictures, which he deemed the most worthy of record, are often introduced as episodes to his main history, and form not the least valuable parts of it. The " Lost One," a tale of a lumberer bewildered in the woods of East Florida, and the " Squatters of the Mississipi," should he reprinted as an appendix to a Colonist's Guide: they will show the new settler the hardships he may have to encounter, and the sort of life he must inevitably lead.
We have hinted at the chief fault of the work—its want of a severe purity of taste : yet we hardly know whether this quality is not one of its charms—it is a thing of which we cannot approve, yet like notwithstanding. After all, it is born, we sus- pect, with the writer, and casmot be removed : it is a mixture of the gay vanity of his Gallic ancestry with the grand magnilo- quence of the land of his birth,—each, however, being happily softened and blended by the enthusiasm and good feeling of the individual.
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