124 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
for Dr. Amos Binney’s work? (Boston). What I was going to say 
about him is that he is a circularian * and understands well the system 
—has read Vigors, Swainson, and company, and is likely to come out 
a philosophic naturalist—an acquisition to the Society. 
ae: 
A fire had occurred in New York, endangering 
Audubon’s engraved copper-plates, and he replies to 
queries of Baird in the following letter: 
From John J. Audubon to S. F. Baird. 
New York, August 7™ 1845. 
My pear Younc FRIEND,— 
I have this moment received your letter of the 4th inst, and will 
answer it at once. 
You have been sadly too well-informed about the plates of our 
large work. They have indeed passed through the great fire of the 
1gth ul°; but we are now engaged in trying to restore them to their 
wonted former existence; although a few of them will have to be 
reingraved for use, if ever that work is republished in its original 
size at all. 
I regret very much that the Northern Hare does not inhabit 
your County or the next adjoining. 
I do most sincerely hope that your Friend now in Texas may try 
to procure the Great Hare of that Country, and also hope that he 
will some time or other furnish us with several Specimens of that 
remarkable Animal. 
I saw in some of the transactions that you had been elected 
Remarkable anatomical drawings of the anatomy of snails, 
forming, with the text, part of the monograph of Binney -on the 
Terrestrial Mollusks of the United States. 
3 This refers to a system of which Swainson was the chief exposi- 
tor, in which Natural groups of the Animal Kingdom were supposed 
to be related to one another after the analogy of impinging circles. 
Leidy probably, like the rest of the scientific world, soon rejected 
a conception purely fantastical and which has long been consigned 
to the limbo of discarded hypotheses. 
