736 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS. 



Although in his systematic work Professor Baird, like other natural- 

 ists, built partly on the scientific foundations laid by his predecessors 

 and contemporaries, always with due acknowledgment, the high value 

 of his work in this dii'ection was largely due to an unerring instinct 

 which enabled him to recognize and confirm the best features of the 

 work of others and by adding material from his own lines of original 

 research to combine the whole into a fabric which was a distinct ad- 

 vance on anything previously offered to the scientific world. 



While the bent of his genius led him, in this as in other departments, 

 to devote a main proportion of his work to the systematic biology which 

 was the need of the time, and which, with the exploration and descrip- 

 tion upon which it is based, must always precede and lay the track for 

 the theoretical biology more in vogue to-day, it must not be supposed 

 that the work of Baird was confined to descriptive and systematic work. 

 With the latter in his publications are combined a host of biographical 

 data such as the field naturalist revels in. One of the earliest and most 

 pregnant papers bearing on mutations of specific forms which have been 

 contributed to the literature of evolution by American biologists is to 

 be found in his article on the "Distribution and Migrations of North 

 American Birds" published in the American Journal of Science in 1866.* 

 In this paper, an abstract of a memoir presented to the National 

 Academy of Sciences in 1865, are to be found the germs of much of the 

 admirable work which has since been elaborated by other biologists on 

 the correlation of geographical distribution and the peculiarities of the 

 environment, with the modifications of color, size, and structure in the 

 forms of animal life, called species. 



Unlike some of his contemporaries twenty years ago, the views of 

 Darwin excited in him no reaction of mind against the hypotheses then 

 novel and revolutionary. His friendly reception of the new theories 

 was so quiet and undisturbed that, to a novice seeking his advice and 

 opinion amid the clatter of contending voices, it seemed almost as if 

 the main features of the scientific gospel of the new era had existed 

 in the mind of Baird from the very beginning. His thorough appren- 

 ticeship in the study of details of structure and their expression in sys- 

 tematic classification, as well as his cautious and judicial habit of mind, 

 prevented him, notwithstanding his hearty recognition of evolutionary 

 processes, from falling into those exuberancies of utterance an^J hypoth- 

 esis characteristic of narrowness and immaturity which, within the 

 memory of most of us, have enjoyed a sort of vogue now happily on the 

 decline. 



Batrachians and Serpents. — Professor Baird's contributions to herpe- 

 tology began as early as 1849, his first paper being a revision of the 

 North American tailed batrachians which appeared in the Journal of 

 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Excluding notices 

 of the work of others in the Annual Record between 1849 and 1880, he 



*Am. Jour. Sci. .aud Arts, 2m\ Series, 18()6, xii, pp. 78-90, 184-192, 3:?7-347. 



