SOURCE: An introduction, to The Imperial Collection of Audubon Animals: The Quadrupeds of North America, Hammond Incorporated, 1967, pp. ix-xvi.

Cahalane was an American natural historian. In the following excerpt he discusses the compilation and publication of The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

The outstanding work on American mammals in the 19th century resulted from a chance meeting of two men. It occurred on October 17, 1831, in Charleston, South Carolina.

John J. Audubon, the famous bird artist and ornithologist, had arrived in town the evening before. With two assistants, landscape painter George Lehman and English taxi-dermist Henry Ward, he had ridden in stiff-sprung coaches, over rough and potholed roads, from Richmond. The three men were disheveled and weary. Their boarding-house, when the bill was presented, proved to be too expensive for Audubon. While he had become the talk of natural history circles as the gifted painter of the first folio...