[61] Audubon's drawings have been criticised for their flatness. Of this, Cuvier says: "It is difficult to give a true picture of a bird with the same effect of perspective as a landscape, and the lack of this is no defect in a work on Natural History. Naturalists prefer the real color of objects to those accidental tints which are the result of the varied reflections of light necessary to complete picturesque representations, but foreign and even injurious to scientific truth."
[62] This was in 1838; they have since been destroyed by fire, or, at least, the greater number.