44 Biology in America 



Here too we meet with Sir Joseph Hooker, director of the Kew 

 Gardens, England, Darwin's elder brother in science, and the 

 man who, with Lyell, the geologist, was more than any other 

 responsible for the publication of the "Origin of Species.' 1 



In the introduction to his scholarly and at the same time 

 interesting work "A History of Land Mammals in the West- 

 ern Hemisphere, ' ' Professor Scott tells us that ' * One afternoon 

 in June, 1876, three Princeton undergraduates were lying 

 under the trees on the canal bank, making a languid pretence 

 of preparing for an examination. Suddenly, one of the trio 

 remarked : ' I have been reading an old magazine article which 

 describes a fossil-collecting expedition in the West ; why can 't 

 we get up something of the kind?' The others replied, as 

 with one voice, 'We can; let's do it.' This seemingly idle 

 talk was, for Osborn and myself, a momentous one, for it 

 completely changed the careers which, as we then believed, 

 had been mapped out for us. The random suggestion led 

 directly to the first of the Princeton palseontological expedi- 

 tions, that of 1877, which took us to the "Bad Lands" of 

 the Bridger region in southwestern Wyoming. " 9 In this 

 trivial incident lay the germ of the collections of vertebrate 

 fossils of Princeton University, and the American Museum of 

 Natural History, and led to many of the most imporant 

 palaBontological discoveries in the world. 



Next to Audubon, Agassiz and Gray, no name is more 

 prominent in the early annals of American biology than that 

 of Spencer Fullerton Baird. In his early career Baird was 

 professor of the natural sciences in Dickinson College, 

 becoming assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 

 in 1850. While in this position he founded the National 

 Museum and prepared the monumental reports upon the 

 mammals and birds collected by the 'several Pacific Railroad 

 surveys during the decade of the fifties. On the latter reports 

 he was assisted by the well-known ornithologists, John Cassin 

 (of Philadelphia) and Geo. N. Lawrence (of New York). 

 He was also joint author with Brewer and Ridgway of the 

 splendid "History of American Birds," published from 1874 

 to 1884. 



Baird was the Nestor of economic zoology in America. 

 Through his activity, aided by other scientists and fish cul- 

 turists throughout the United States, the U. S. Fish Commis- 

 sion was established in 1874, and he was appointed its com- 

 missioner, a post which he filled without salary for a number 

 of years. The organization of this great institution, whose 

 work is briefly mentioned in another chapter, we owe to 

 Professor Baird. 



'Quoted by permission of the Macmillan Company. 



