382 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 



From Dr. Henry Bryant 34 to Spencer F. Baird. 



LYME REGIS (ENGLAND) May 9, 1865. 

 MY DEAR PROF. 



I have not written to you for some time at least I have written 

 very briefly and therefore intend the present to make up for it. In 

 the first place I will premise that you did not act with your usual 

 wisdom in not telling Verreaux to send me word of Lafresnaye's 

 collection and in consequence of the length of time it took for you 

 to receive in the first place, and I in the second place, his letter to 

 you announcing the sale, I shall be unable I presume to get to Falaise 

 in time to make any purchase. I am very sorry as I had fully counted 

 on purchasing all his American types. 



From Dr. Henry Bryant to Spencer F. Baird. 



PARIS 18 juillet, 1865. 

 DEAR PROF. 



I think in my last I told you I would make the attempt to get 

 the Falaise (in) time enough to attend the sale of the La Fresnaye 

 collection. I could not find anybody who knew the way there. 



34 Henry Bryant, M.D., born in Boston, May 12, 1820; graduated 

 at Harvard in 1840, and in medicine in 1843, studied in Paris and 

 returned to America in 1847. He married Elisabeth B. Sohier in 

 1848; was active in the medical service of the army during the early 

 part of the Civil War, but was obliged to leave the service on account 

 of ill health in 1863. His physical condition was never of the best 

 and occasioned him to spend much time in the open air, which he 

 utilized in the collection and study of birds. In 1866 he purchased 

 the La Fresnaye collection of birds referred to in the above letters 

 and gave it to the Boston Society. It was regarded by Baird as the 

 most important foreign collection for American students, no other 

 containing so many original types of American species. Dr. Bryant 

 died while on a collecting tour in Porto Rico, February 2, 1868. The 

 La Fresnaye collection has since been deposited in the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass. 



