RELATIONS BETWEEN PKOFESSOR BAIRD AND PARTICI- 

 PATING SOC5IETIES. 



By Mr. Garrick Mallery, President of the l'hilo>iophical Society. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: During several winters before 1871, a 

 club, with commingled social and scientific purposes, used to meet in 

 this city at the houses of its members. A single paper on some scien- 

 tific subject was read, usually by the host of the evening, following 

 which was a discussion. Supper was always j)rovided. The title of 

 the club only related to the night of meeting, Saturday, and the or- 

 ganization was so loose that several of the survivors among the regu- 

 lar participants at the meetings do not now remember whether they 

 were actual members, or indeed that there was a definite membership. 

 As the city of Washington emergetl from the condition of a Southern 

 village, and the benign policy of the Government increased the num- 

 ber and force of the scientific institutions at the capital, the need of 

 an organization which should bring scientific men together on an equal 

 footing and give more time to papers and their discussion became man- 

 ifest. To meet this want the attendants of the Saturday-Night Club, 

 on March 13, 1871, formed the Philosophical Society of Washington, 

 its object, in the words of the call, being " the free exchange of views 

 on scientific subjects and the promotion of scientific inquiry among 

 its members." 



The term " philosophical," as the first president of the society, 

 Joseph Henry, stated in his first address, was chosen after consider- 

 able deliberation, " not to denote, as it generally does in the present 

 day, the unbounded field of speculative thought, which embraces the 

 possible as well as the actual of existence, but to be used in its re- 

 stricted sense to indicate those branches of knowledge that relate to 

 the positive facts and laws of the physical and moral universe." 



Of the forty-three gentlemen who signed the call twenty-one are now 

 dead. Professor Baird was prominent among the founders, and served 

 continuously as a member of the general committee from the organi- 

 zation to November 10, 1877; and from that date until his death, on 

 August 19 last, he was a member of the committee on publications. 



The first communication of a scientific paper to the Society was made 

 by him on March 18, 1871. The most important and extended original 



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