What was here said of Audubon might have been true in 1830, but it was not true in 1840. Swainson could never understand that his friend was a man who never stood still. Audubon drew heavily upon his more learned associates, and he could give as well as take. When working under the influence of a powerful motive, he improved as rapidly in his use of English words as he had in the finish and composition of his pictures; he soon came to write not only with fluency but at times with eloquence, and the technicalities of his science did not remain to him a sealed book, though for the drudgery of detailed description he had confessedly no stomach.
We have referred to William Swainson's advocacy of the "Circular" or "Quinarian" system of the classification of animals, with him amounting almost to a monomania, which was one of the most notorious examples of reasoning in a circle of which zoölogists have ever been guilty. It was a serious attempt to rationalize nature in a wholly irrational manner, and must be regarded as a curious by-product of minds fixed in the belief of a special creation,—to whom every form of evolutionary doctrine was sacrilegious and abhorrent. Its advocates, nevertheless, were sincere, and Swainson probably regarded himself as a martyr to the cause. As a later critic remarked, the system served him well by investing with a cloak of originality his treatises on those classes of animals with which he had little first-hand knowledge. His work on fishes is regarded as "a literary curiosity, the appearance of which was a misfortune to a man who, by his indefatigable industry under by no means favorable circumstances, had contributed as much as any of his contemporaries to the advancement of Zoölogy and its diffusion among the people."[109] This egregious doctrine, which its disciples called "the natural system" without grasping the true meaning of "affinity," or "homology," to use the more modern word, vitiated most of their writings; abler men played with it for a time, only to cast it aside, and no one but a historian or a psychologist would now give it a passing thought.
So far as Swainson was concerned, Audubon's conduct appears to have been above reproach, and it must be regarded as fortunate that this ardent "Quinarian" did not have a hand in the Biography of Birds, for if it were really true that Audubon could have brought himself to accept the artificial system then in vogue, American ornithology, as Elliott Coues remarked, escaped a great affliction.
Swainson's early life affords a striking illustration of nepotism, and his later years reflected some of its disastrous consequences. At fourteen he was appointed as a junior clerk in the Liverpool Customs House at a salary of eighty pounds a year, to service under his father, who had in turn succeeded his grandfather in the office of Collector. At eighteen he received an appointment in the commissary department of the English army and went to Sicily, where he remained eight years, during which he worked industriously at natural-history pursuits. Having attained the rank of Assistant Commissary-General, at twenty-six he was retired on half-pay because of ill health. Upon returning to England he became a member of the Linnæan Society, in 1816, before his departure for Brazil, where with Henry Koster he collected birds for nearly two years. Having settled again at Liverpool, he entered the Royal Society, on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, in 1820, the year in which he began to publish the results of his studies. Swainson was married in 1825, but upon the death of his father in the following year, his income so much reduced that he resorted to authorship as a profession; of course he found it a poor crutch, though he worked with indefatigable industry and produced from one to two illustrated volumes each year. Eventually he became embittered against Audubon and towards the world of men and things in general, especially after 1835, when domestic bereavement and trouble of many kinds pressed hard upon him. He repeatedly applied to the Zoölogical Department of the British Museum for a position which went to others; he tried to sell his collections to the Museum and failed; he applied for an appointment on the Civil List but was denied; then he decided to give up the struggle of authorship in England and leave the country.
In 1840 Swainson emigrated with his family to New Zealand, where he seems to have met with no better success, although his scientific activity did not wholly cease. Though four years younger than Audubon, he outlived him five years, dying in 1856. His excellent draughtsmanship, tireless industry, and punctilious habits were deserving of recognition, but he suffered from the lack of a liberal education, and was rather too vain, too inclined to jealousy and to quarrel with his contemporaries, to have achieved great success.
WILLIAM SWAINSON
CHARLES L. BONAPARTE THOMAS NUTTALL
CONSTANTINE S. RAFINESQUE
SWAINSON FROM HIS "BIOGRAPHY OF ZOÖLOGISTS"; NUTTALL FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER DERRY, 1825; BONAPARTE FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF MR. RUTHVEN DEANE, FIRST PUBLISHED IN "CASSINIA"; AND RAFINESQUE FROM RICHARD ELLSWORTH CALL, "RAFINESQUE."
In a paragraph already quoted from the Ornithological Biography, in which Audubon portrayed the eagerness with which some naturalists pressed forward to describe new species of birds, too often forgetting every propriety in their eagerness to outstrip a rival, the name of his "excellent friend, Charles Lucien Bonaparte,"[110] had been indiscreetly mentioned. Though there was no evident intention of giving offense, this reference was keenly resented. Bonaparte, it may be recalled, was still engaged upon his American Ornithology, the last volume of which was not published until 1833, and was therefore, in a degree, a rival of Audubon in the ornithological field. Audubon did his best to smooth over the difficulty but with little success. In writing to his son, Victor, from New York in 1833,[111] he referred to the following letter which he was about to send "by duplicate, to try to correct that error" of his early friend: