

r 



SPENCER F. BAIRD. 



BY the death of Professor Spencer Ful- 

 lerton Baird, which occurred at Wood's 

 HoU, Mass., on the 19th August last, Amer- 

 ica has lost one of the greatest men and 

 most efficient scientific workers this conti- 

 nent has given birth to 



Professor Baird was for many of the 

 later years of his life the Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, and United States 

 Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, and 

 in each of these offices he perfected so ex- 

 cellent an organization of men and means, 

 and achieved such important results, that 

 his claim to name and fame might very 

 well have rested on his achievements in 

 either department. But when we consider 

 that, valuable as were his labors in these im- 



portant offices, they were but a small frac- 

 tion of his life's work, that as a scientific 

 man his writings had brought him world- 

 wide fame, that the catalogue of his pub- 

 lished contributions to science embraced 

 ov^r a thousand titles, and that of every 

 subject of which he wrote he displayed 

 such a knowledge as to render him a final 

 authority, we begin to have some concep- 

 tion of the greatness of the man and to re- 

 alize how largely he contributed to the 

 maintenance of his country in the race of 

 intellectual progress. 



Spencer Fullerton Baird was born at 

 Reading, Pa., Feb. 23, 1823, and at an 

 early age displayed that taste for natural 

 history, which united with his definiteness 



