406 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 



October. On November 6th he travelled from Washing- 

 ton to Cambridge, where on the 8th the ancient University 

 of Harvard honored herself by conferring upon him the 

 degree of Doctor of Laws. He attended the Boston meet- 

 ing of the National Academy of Sciences, and returned 

 to Washington November loth, for the last time. Baird 

 by this time was fully aware that his physical condition 

 was serious. At the annual meeting of the Board of 

 Regents in 1887, he presented the case and, in view of 

 his possible disability and at his recommendation, action 

 was taken accordingly. The tradition has been that 

 naturalists and physicists should alternate as successive 

 secretaries of the Smithsonian Institution, thus giving 

 each branch of Science its turn at the highest honor 

 American science has to bestow. In accordance with 

 this unwritten understanding, Professor Samuel Pierpont 

 Langley, astronomer and physicist, was appointed Assis- 

 tant Secretary in charge of the Smithsonian activities 

 (with the tacit right of succession) and Doctor George 

 Brown Goode put in charge of the Museum and natural 

 history work. 



Medical advice to Baird was that he must relinquish 

 work entirely for at least a year to have any hope of 

 survival. He consented to retire to Elizabethtown, N. Y., 

 in the Adirondack region, where he arrived on the 2Oth 

 of May. There was a superficial improvement in his 

 condition, his recovery was rumored, and letters of 

 affectionate congratulation began to pour in. It is doubt- 

 ful if he himself was deceived, but in July he left the 

 Adirondacks for Wood's Hole, the scene of his hardest 

 labors and most striking economic successes. 



Here he dictated a letter occasionally and waited for 

 better days. 



