SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD. 
By Hues M. Sirs. 
The life, the character, the work of Spencer Fullerton Baird entitle 
him to recognition in any assemblage and on any occasion where honor 
is paid to those who have been their country’s benefactors through 
illustrious achievements in science. 
Developing a taste for scientific pursuits at a very early age, and 
confirmed in those pursuits through the influence of friendships with 
Agassiz, Audubon, Dana and other leading scientists of the time, 
Baird was selected as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion when only twenty-seven years old, and there entered on a career 
devoted to the promotion, diffusion and application of scientific knowl- 
edge among men, and marked by dignity, sound judgment, fidelity to 
duty, versatility and general usefulness. 
In the many phases of his intellectual development he resembled 
Franklin and Cope; in the multiplicity of his public duties and in the 
diversity of the scientific accomplishments in which he attained emi- 
nence he had few equals; in founding, organizing and simultaneously 
directing a number of great national scientific enterprises he was unique 
among those whose memory is here extolled today. 
To render an adequate account of the branches of scientific endeavor 
in which he achieved prominence, benefited his own and future gen- 
erations and added to his country’s renown, one would need to be an 
ornithologist, a mammalogist, an ichthyologist, a herpetologist, an 
invertebrate zodlogist, an anthropologist, a botanist, a geologist, a 
paleontologist, a deep-sea explorer, a fishery expert, a fish-culturist, 
an active administrator of scientific institutions and an adviser of the 
federal government in scientific affairs,—for Baird was all these and 
more. 
We freely acknowledge today the debt that science owed Baird 
alive and now owes his memory, especially for his inestimable services 
as assistant secretary and later as secretary of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution, as director of the National Museum and as head of the Com- 
mission of Fish and Fisheries. Among all the establishments with which 
he was connected, this last was preéminently and peculiarly his own. 
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