THE PERSOi^^AL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROFESSOR BAIRD. 



By J. W. Powell, President of the Anthropological Society. 



Baird was one of the learned men of the world, and, to a degree per- 

 haps unexampled in histon , he was the discoverer of the knowledge he 

 possessed. He knew the birds of the air, from the ptarmigan that lives 

 among everlasting snows to the humming-bird tliat revels among the 

 orchids of the tropics ; he knew the beasts of the forests and the prai- 

 ries, and the reptiles that crawl through desert sands or slimy marshes; 

 he knew the fishes that scale mountain torrents, that bask in quiet 

 lakes, or that journey from zone to zone through the deep waters of the 

 sea. In all this realm of nature he had a minute and comprehensive 

 knowledge that no other man has ever acquired. What others had 

 recorded in this field of research he knew, and to their discoveries he 

 made a contribution of his own so bounteous, so stupendous, that he is 

 recognized as the master of systematic zoologists. 



All of Baird's scientific work is an illustration of modern inductive 

 or scientific reasoning. The inductions or general principles of modern 

 science are reached by the accumulation of vast stores of facts. He 

 knew how to accumulate facts; how to reject the trivial and select the 

 significant. Modern science is almost buried under the debris of obser- 

 vation, the record of facts without meaning, the sands of fact that are 

 ground from the rock of truth by the attrition of mind ; but Baird could 

 walk over the sands and see the diamonds. Then he knew how to 

 marshal significant facts into systems, and how to weld them into funda- 

 mental principles. In all his works there can be discovered no taint of 

 a priori reasoning or syllogistic logic ; for in his mind there was no 

 room for controversy; and disputation fled before the light of his 

 genius. Formal logic, a disease of modern thought, the contagion of 

 Aristotleina, never ravaged his brain. With healthful directness, he 

 sought the truth guided by wise inference, and told the truth in its 

 simplicity. 



739 



