I2 4 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 



for Dr. Amos Binney's work 2 (Boston). What I was going to say 

 about him is that he is a circularian 3 and understands well the system 

 has read Vigors, Swainson, and company, and is likely to come out 

 a philosophic naturalist an acquisition to the Society. . . . 



J. C. 



A fire had occurred in New York, endangering 

 Audubon's engraved copper-plates, and he replies to 

 queries of Baird in the following letter: 



From John J. Audnbon to S. F. Baird. 



NEW YORK, August 7 th 1845. 

 MY DEAR YOUNG FRIEND, 



I have this moment received your letter of the 4th inst, and will 

 answer it at once. 



You have been sadly too well-informed about the plates of our 

 large work. They have indeed passed through the great fire of the 

 igth ul; but we are now engaged in trying to restore them to their 

 wonted former existence; although a few of them will have to be 

 reingraved for use, if ever that work is republished in its original 

 size at all. 



I regret very much that the Northern Hare does not inhabit 

 your County or the next adjoining. 



I do most sincerely hope that your Friend now in Texas may try 

 to procure the Great Hare of that Country, and also hope that he 

 will some time or other furnish us with several Specimens of that 

 remarkable Animal. 



1 saw in some of the transactions that you had been elected 



2 Remarkable anatomical drawings of the anatomy of snails, 

 forming, with the text, part of the monograph of Binney on the 

 Terrestrial Mollusks of the United States. 



3 This refers to a system of which Swainson was the chief exposi- 

 tor, in which Natural groups of the Animal Kingdom were supposed 

 to be related to one another after the analogy of impinging circles. 

 Leidy probably, like the rest of the scientific world, soon rejected 

 a conception purely fantastical and which has long been consigned 

 to the limbo of discarded hypotheses. 



