To Benjamin Franklin from Edmé-Louis Daubenton, 31 May 1773
From Edmé-Louis Daubenton5
AL: American Philosophical Society
au jardin du Roy ce 31. may. [1773]
M. Daubenton le jeune a l’honneur de presenter son hommage à Monsieur franklin et de l’assurer de son respect en lui envoyant les nouveaux Cayers des oiseaux enluminés qui lui manquent pour completer son exemplaire. Il aura grand soin de mettre a part ceux qui restent à faire et de les envoyer à Monsieur franklin.
Addressed: A Monsieur / Monsieur franklin / membre de plusieurs academies / pres de la Muette / à Passy6
5. Known as Daubenton le jeune (1732–85) to distinguish him from his older and far more famous relative, Louis-Jean-Marie, who collaborated for years with the comte de Buffon in the Jardin du roi; see above, XV, 141–2 n. The younger man, employed in the same collections, began in 1765 to publish a series of colored engravings of birds by François-Nicolas Martinet (b. 1731), designed to illustrate Buffon’s monumental Histoire naturelle des oiseaux. Between 1770 and 1786 this work appeared in four different formats. Two were illustrated with line engravings; the other two had references for inserting the colored plates, which were completed in 1780 in forty-two fascicles containing more than a thousand illustrations. Noël Mayaud, “Les éditions originales de l’ Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de Buffon,” Alauda: revue trimestrielle d’ornithologie … 3rd ser., XI (1939), 19–20. Daubenton was enclosing some of these fascicles for BF’s copy of the Histoire.
6. The home of Jean-Baptiste LeRoy, who was forwarding the plates to BF; see Daubenton’s second note below, July 20.