3 io POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Developing a taste for scientific pursuits at a very early age, and 

 confirmed in those pursuits through the influence of friendships with 

 Agassiz, Audubon, Dana and other leading scientists of the time, Baird 

 was selected as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution when 

 only twenty-seven years old, and there entered on a career devoted to 

 the promotion, diffusion, and application of scientific knowledge among 

 men, and marked by dignity, sound judgment, fidelity to duty, versa- 

 tility and general usefulness. 



In the many phases of his intellectual development he resembled 

 Franklin and Cope; in the multiplicity of his public duties and in 

 the diversity of the scientific accomplishments in which he attained 

 eminence he had few equals; in founding, organizing and simulta- 

 neously directing a number of great national scientific enterprises 

 he was unique among those whose memory is here extolled to-day. 



To render an adequate account of the branches of scientific endeavor 

 in which he achieved prominence, benefited his own and future gene- 

 rations and added to his country's renown, one would need to be an 

 ornithologist, a mammalologist, an ichthyologist, a herpetologist, an 

 invertebrate zoologist, an anthropologist, a botanist, a geologist, a 

 paleontologist, a deep-sea explorer, a fishery expert, a fish-culturist, an 

 active administrator of scientific institutions, and an adviser of the 

 federal government in scientific affairs; for Baird was all these and 

 more. 



We freely acknowledge to-day the debt that science owed Baird 

 alive and now owes his memory, especially for his inestimable services 

 as assistant secretary and later as secretary of the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution, as director of the National Museum, and as head of the Com- 

 mission of Fish and Fisheries. Among all the establishments with 

 which he was connected, this last was preeminently and peculiarly 

 his own. It was conceived by him and created for him, and it would 

 almost appear that he was created for it, for certainly no other person 

 of his day and generation was so admirably fitted for the task of 

 organizing this bureau and of executing the duties that grew out of its 

 functions as successively enlarged by congress. Insisting on scientific 

 investigations and knowledge as the essential basis for all current and 

 prospective utilitarian work, he drew around him a corps of eminent 

 biologists and physicists; he established laboratories; he laid plans for 

 the systematic study of our interior and coastal waters ; he had vessels 

 built that were especially designed and equipped for exploration of 

 the seas. While he thus inaugurated operations which have been of 

 lasting benefit to the fisheries, at the same time he became the foremost 

 promoter and exponent of marine research, and the knowledge we to- 

 day possess of oceanic biology and physics is directly or indirectly 

 due to Baird more than to any other person. The rapid development 



