In Two Volumes, Large 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top, price £1, 10s. Net. With Thirty-seven Illustrations, including Three hitherto unpublished Bird Drawings and Ten Portraits of Audubon.
Audubon, and His Journals.
By Maria R. Audubon. With Notes by Elliott Coues.
Contents.—Audubon: A Biography. The European Journals, 1826-29. The Labrador Journal, 1833. The Missouri River Journal, 1843. The Episodes. With a full Index.
Note.—To English people the name of Audubon is a familiar and respected one, and there is little reason to doubt that the present work, forming as it does so handsome a monument of his life’s work, should be acceptable both to the lover of good books and to the naturalist. The former has the attraction of Audubon’s picturesque and engaging English style, added to reminiscences and narratives of a diverse and fascinating character, and a highly interesting biography of Audubon from the pen of his granddaughter. The naturalist, on the other hand, has here for the first time the complete and carefully edited text of Audubon’s valuable journals, supplemented by appropriate and interesting notes by so eminent a zoologist as Dr. Elliott Coues. The entire publication is virtually new, since even the European journals are here much amplified, while the Missouri and Labrador journals are practically unpublished, and the “Episodes” have never before appeared collectively except in a French translation. The work is one of the widest interest, and must at once take its place as the authoritative biography of Audubon, as well as the first adequate presentation of his journals, which in their now complete form give “the man instead of the death mask.”
Times.—“Audubon’s unpublished manuscripts are the record of a long, a varied, and an adventurous life, passed in unremitting activity and indefatigable industry. We must say at once that for the most part they are fascinating. They are sensational, instructive, and frankly autobiographical, and they show a many-sided man in his various aspects, with the absolute unreserve of innocent egoism.”
Saturday Review.—“There is much that will interest readers of vastly different tastes. Thus the European journals in the first volume have an interest that is chiefly personal, and we get interesting scraps of conversation with Sir Walter Scott, Jeffrey, Wilson, Lord Stanley, Cuvier, St. Hilaire, Selby, Constant, Gerard, Jardine, and Bewick, as well as many other notables in the science, art, and literature of Edinburgh, London, and Paris in the late twenties.”
Spectator.—“The two volumes present the life of the great French-American naturalist in a most attractive form. The journal of his voyage up the Missouri is now first given to the world, and the freshness of his life in the woods and of his own charming personality is not marred by any unwise editing or comment. The illustrations are excellent, worthy of a work dealing with the life of the man who used the instruction received from the revolutionary painter David in his youth to make the greatest advance in the illustration of nature ever achieved by one man.”