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Cover Legend: John James Audubon (1785-1851), White Crowned Pigeon, Plate CLXXVII from The Birds of America (1827-1838); hand-colored engraving by Robert Havell; courtesy of the Library of the American Museum of Natural History/MBLWHOI Library consortium. This plate from Audubon's The Birds of America is an example of a style of scientific illustration that differs radically from that of his precursors such as Buffon or Wilson. Audubon brings birds to life, showing them as family members in their natural habitat, in realistic poses, and dynamic interactions. Audubon aimed to catalogue the diversity of species and to document in minute detail the full range of birds in America (all too aware that his paintings would serve as documents of a vanishing wilderness.) However, it was not his art, but his science, that convinced Baron Cuvier to introduce Audubon at the French Academy of Sciences in 1828: "The greatest monument yet erected by Art to Nature," said the Baron of the Birds of America. Audubon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1830, sharing that FRS with only one antebellum American, Benjamin Franklin. Audubon was also a great resource for Charles Darwin. It was after he attended an 1826 lecture by Audubon in Edinburgh (where Darwin was a medical student at the time) that Darwin began to pay close attention to Audubon's work. Pigeons were of great interest to both "Believing that it is always best to study some special group… I have been permitted to join two of the London Pigeon Clubs," wrote Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859). Indeed, among the references in that book Lamarck, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and even Erasmus Darwin rate but a single mention apiece, while Audubon is quoted thrice, as often as Cuvier. The index of Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, (1871) lists The Birds of America over two dozen times and Audubon and Bachman twice. It seems appropriate, therefore, that Audubon's tombstone in upper Manhattan was paid for and erected by the New York Academy of Sciences rather than its National Academy of Design. (From the exhibition, "Whitman's Pigeons," curated by Ann Weissmann at the MBLWHOI Library, Woods Hole, MA, www.mblwhoilibrary.org)