742 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS. 



All that I have said is a part of the public record, found in the 

 great libraries of the world; but however exalted the feeling of ad- 

 miratioD we may entertain for Baird as a scholar and administrator, 

 it is to his attributes as a man, as disclosed in his personal relations 

 with friends, associates, and men of affairs, that we most fondly turn. 

 It is in these relations that he most clearly exhibited those kindly and 

 modest traits of character which made him so universally beloved. 



As a man of affairs, Professor Baird exhibited great sagacity. His 

 plans for the organization of scientific work were of great magnitude, 

 and had they been presented to the administrative officers of the 

 Government or to legivslative bodies with exaggeration, or even had 

 they been presented with the glow of an enthusiastic missionary of 

 science, they might well have encountered opposition. But Baird had 

 a wonderful faculty of presenting his plans with extreme modesty, 

 and with a degree of understatement, but suggestion of possibilities 

 which speedily caused him to whom the appeal was made, himself to 

 b(* jome an advocate of the Professor's measure. He had traits of char- 

 acter in this respect which are hard to explain, and which seem at first 

 to be contradictory. In the advocacy of measures his modesty amounted 

 almost to timidity; he avoided alike argumeutation and ostentation, 

 and he presented his measures with the directness of a child. Not- 

 withstanding all this, there was such a poise of faculties, such dig- 

 nity of mien, that he impressed those with whom he came in contact 

 as a venerable and wise patriarch. He seemed devoid of personal in- 

 terest or feeling, and solicitous only for the welfare of those to whom 

 he was in fact appealing, and he conveyed the impression that he was 

 giving benignant advice. Thus the shrinking, sensitive man, who 

 could not even stand before a public body, such as a committee of Con- 

 gress, or a scientific society, and advocate a cause, could from his seat 

 by the fireside or at the desk, so illumine the subject with which he 

 had to deal that men stood round him to gather his words, that noth- 

 ing should be lost; for in the exposition of his subject he illumined 

 everything with clear statement, arising from an exhaustive knowledge^ 

 and full understanding of results. 



As the director of the work of research in which other men were en- 

 gaged, Professor Baird had marvellous insight and skill. The appli- 

 ances of modern research, alike in the inorganic world and in biology, 

 have come to be multifarious and diverse, and there is this peculiarity 

 about them ; — once used, so that the secret of nature which they 

 were planned to unlock has been revealed, they speedily become 

 obsolete, and immediately new keys, new apparatus, new devices are 

 necessary. Thus to a large extent skill in research is absorbed in the 

 skill necessary for the development of the agencies of research. A 

 continuous line of research, prosecuted by a corps of men so that the 

 boundaries of knowledge are carried far forward, can result only from 

 a continuous line of inventions in the apparatus of research, and it was 



