"Half artist, half man of action": John James Audubon and The Birds of America

Abstract

looking at our present knowledge of the natural history of any vast country, Sir William Jardin warned in 1832, we generally lose sight of a very important circumstance. In their perpetual rush to embrace current information, Jardin feared that Americans habitually undervalued the work of early naturalists, and their sources of information.' Such malpractice meant that important texts were too readily dislodged from the cultural memory. More than just another Jacksonian era admonition against the rush to celebrate progress, Jardin's caution registers a concern over the cost of losing a nuanced record of change over time. By advocating for a historically informed consciousness, Jardin suggests that the development of a nation's natural histories may reflect much more than a simple trajectory of ever expanding scientific information. By attending to how naturalists formulated their interpretations, a reader may discover a record of the relationship between cultural development and scientific inquiry. A country's outdated catalog of natural history texts, Jardin implies, may well be an unrivaled repository of information about the growth of the nation itself. While Thomas Jefferson was mistaken about wandering herds of mammoths in the western portions of North America, his assumptions concerning their existence are telling. For Jefferson, the economy of nature was such that extinction was impossible; thus, the presence of fossilized mammoth bones evidenced their continued existence. Yet, what is tantamount to a minor aside about mammoths in Notes on the State of Virginia, serves as an example of Jefferson's unwillingness to concede how changes in an environment might led to the elimination of indigenous populations. Seen in this light, his denial