Note 19 — AUDUBON

In 1836, Audubon wrote to Dr. John Bachman: "Some of my early drawings of European birds are still in our possession, but many have been given away, and the greatest number were destroyed, not by the rats that gnawed my collection of the "Birds of America," but by the great fire in New York, as these drawings were considered my wife's special property and seldom out of her sight. Would that the others had been under her especial care also! Yet, after all, who can say that it was not a material advantage, both to myself and to the world, that the Norway rats destroyed those drawings?"