SPENCER F. BAIRD. 733 



(Int. - - - It is i)roper to state, that owin.s: to various circum- 

 stances, the work was necessarily passed through the press with a 

 rapidity i)robahly unexampled in the history of natural-history printing, 

 allowing very little opportunity for that critical and leisurely examina- 

 tion so necessary in correcting a work of the kind. For most of the 

 time the i)roof has been furnished and read at the rate of twenty-four 

 to thirty-two pages per day, nearly 400 })ages having been set up, read, 

 and printed during the first half of July alone. Owing to the urgent 

 necessity for the speedy completion of the volume, no time was allowed 

 for the revision of the manuscript as a co rplete work, nor, indeed, of 

 its separate portions, and, for much of the time, the preparation of 

 much of the manuscript was only a few hours in advance of its delivery 

 to the compositor. 



The volume above referred to contains over 800 quarto pages and 42 

 plates. The manuscript was entirely prei)ared" after G o'clock of work- 

 ing days which had been spent in the active administrative and execu- 

 tive work of the Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 then unassisted by stenographer or other clerical supplement. Fortu- 

 nately for science Baird did not always have to work under such cir- 

 cumstances, but the incident shows what he was capable of doing when 

 the occasion seemed to him to warrant it. Probably no other work of 

 ecpial importance, on any subject, was ever carried out under such 

 pressure. 



Mammals. — Professor Baird's contributions to a knowledge of North 

 American mammals, though less voluminous than those relating to 

 birds, are not less important. Previous to this time but one general 

 work on the subject had been published, that of Audubon and Bach- 

 man on the Quadrupeds of North America, which was issued in three 

 volumes, from 1840 to 1854.* Immediately after the completion of this 

 great work collections began to pour into the Smithsonian Institution 

 from the various exploring parties of the Pacific Railway surveys. 

 This material comprised so large a number of new species, and cast so 

 much light upon many previously doubtful points concerning the rela- 

 tions of species already described, that a revision of the whole subject 

 becanic necessary. Hence Professor Baird at once set about the prep- 

 aration of the book commonly known as the Mammals of North Amer- 

 ica. I have already alluded to the manner in which it was prepared. 

 This great work was rapidly pushed to (jompletion and appeared in 

 1857, just three years after the publication of the last volume of Audu- 

 bon and Bachman's Quadrupeds. It constitutes the eighth volume of 

 the Pacific Railroad Reports, and is a ponderous quarto of more than 

 800 pages, accompanied by numerous excellent plates. 



Though published thirty years ago, this work still remains the stand- 

 ard general treatise on North American mammals. It contains no bio- 

 graphical matter, but consists wholly of technical descriptions. It 

 treats of all the mammals then known from the continent of North 



*The volume on Mammals of Richardson's Fauna Boreali Americana does not fall 

 under this head, because it treats only of the northern portion of the continent. 



