$4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



During the last thirteen years Prof. Baird has been occupied 

 chiefly witli his official duties as head of tlie Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution and of tlio United States Museum, and with the Unitctl 

 States Fish Commission, of which lie was also President, In all 

 these capacities he has rendered signal service to science, his 

 personal zeal and his genial disposition producing a world-wide 

 influence. His colleague and fellow-countryman, Mr. Eobert 

 Ridgway, has written of him as " one who in history must hold 

 a place at the head of American naturalists, and in the hearts of 

 those who knew him a place which none other can fill." 



Prof. Baird was elected a Foreign Member of this Society in 

 1870. He died at AVood's Hall, Massachusetts, on 22nd August, 

 1887. 



John Thomas Irvine Boswell (formerly Syme) was born in 

 Queen Street, Edinburgh, on December 1st, 1822, in the house now 

 occupied by the Philosophical Institution. His father was Patrick 

 Syme, an artist who paid much attention to Natural History and 

 published a small work on the correct denomination of colours in 

 descriptions of plants and animals, also an illustrated work on 

 British Song-birds. His mother had been a Miss Boswell, a 

 daugliter of Lord Balmuto, and had a keen love for botany as well 

 as being an excellent artist. Young Syme was put to school at 

 Dollar, where his father held an appointment as teacher of draw- 

 ing, and in early days he showed an aptitude for the study of 

 plants, insects, and shells. 



On leaving school he was articled to an engineering firm at 

 Edinburgh, and on the expii'atiou of his time he spent a few 

 years as land-surveyor, taking every opportunity during his 

 journeys of botanical exploration. He helped Hewett Cottrell 

 Watson by supplying him with checked lists for the counties 

 of Fife and Kincardine, also for West Perthshire and Orkney. 

 About 1850 he undertook the curatorshij) of the Edinburgh Bo- 

 tanical Society, and in February of that year he read a pajjer 

 before that bod}^ on the plants he collected in Orkney whilst 

 visiting his relations in the summer of 1819, which, being printed 

 in the fourth volume of the ' Transactions,' led to correspondence 

 with Watson, ending in his undertaking the Curatorship of the 

 Botanical Society of London in 1851. This was immediately 

 succeeded by his removing to Loudon, where he first lived at 

 Provost Road, and later in Adelaide Road, Haverstock Hill. 



The two following years he gave to exploring the country 

 around London and the investigation of the many southern forms, 

 which he then first gathered, publishing his remarks in the 

 fourth volume of the ' Phytologist.' 



On March 21, 1854, he was elected Fellow of this Society and 

 became Botanical Lecturer at the Charing Cross School of Medi- 

 cine, and afterwards at that of AVestminster, a post he occupied 

 for several years. About this time the parcels of dried plants 



