Note 302 — Chapter XXI · DÉBUT AS A NATURALIST

Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, Prince of Canino and Musignano, the eldest son of Lucien, and nephew of Napoleon, Bonaparte, was born at Paris in 1803, and died there in 1857. At this time he was settled with his uncle and father-in-law, Joseph Bonaparte, former King of Spain, at Philadelphia, and there and at Bordentown, New Jersey, where Joseph had an estate, he undertook the study of American birds. His best known scientific works are: American Ornithology, or the Natural History of the Birds of the United States, not Given by Wilson, 4 volumes, quarto, with 27 colored plates, Philadelphia, 1825-1833; and Iconographica della Fauna Italica, Rome, 1833-1841. In 1828 he retired to Italy, where he was devoted to literary and scientific pursuits. He was an early subscriber to Audubon's Birds of America, but their relations were somewhat strained on the publication of the Ornithological Biography in 1831 (see Chapter XXIX). Bonaparte later entered politics in Italy, and was leader of the republican party at Rome in 1848 and 1849; after having been expelled from France by the order of Louis Napoleon, he was permitted to return in 1850, and became director of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

He was a closet naturalist rather than a field student, but did much for the reform of nomenclature. In his Ornithology the number of American birds was raised to 366, nearly one hundred having been added since the work of Wilson was revised by Ord, but he added only two that were new, Cooper's Hawk, (Accipiter cooperi), named after William Cooper of New York, and Say's Phœbe (Sayornis saya), dedicated to Thomas Say, and first procured by Titian R. Peale in the Rocky Mountain districts of the Far West. Perhaps his most important technical work, the Conspectus Generum Avium, begun in 1850, was incomplete at the time of his death.