1 62 The Smithsonian Institution 



and character. Many of them were Quakers, but there were 

 also Churchmen, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Among them 

 were soldiers, sailors, clergymen, lawyers, financiers, survey- 

 ors, miners, farmers, mechanics, military officers, British and 

 American ; patriots and loyalists, Whigs and Tories, Feder- 

 alists and Republicans. With such ancestral resources to 

 draw upon, it is not strange that Professor Baird should have 

 been a man of varied and commanding abilities. His admin- 

 istrative capacity, his power of directing and controlling men, 

 and his personal charm of manner, came to him perhaps 

 chiefly from his mother ; while to his father's family he owed 

 his love of outdoor life, his taste for the study of nature, and 

 his magnificent physique, a heritage from generations of pio- 

 neers and frontiersmen. Those who knew him best may be 

 disposed to attribute to his Quaker ancestry his quiet and 

 unassuming manner, his dislike for publicity, and his prefer- 

 ence for a simple garb of gray. 



in. 



SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD was born February 23, 1823, in 

 Reading, Pennsylvania. His father died when he was ten 

 years old, and his mother soon removed with her family to 

 Carlisle, a village in the beautiful Cumberland Valley, which 

 was the seat of Dickinson College and of a government 

 military post, and the home of many people of culture and 

 refinement. 



When he was eleven he was sent to a Friends' boarding- 

 school, kept by Doctor McGraw, in Port Deposit, Maryland ; 

 a year later entered the grammar school in Carlisle, and in 

 1836 Dickinson College, from which he was graduated in 

 1840, at the age of seventeen. 



His interest in collecting and classifying facts and in ob- 



