THE YOUNG PROFESSOR 171 
Alfred A. H. Ames (1848), afterward in the ministry and 
an assistant in the work on the Iconographic Encyclo- 
pedia. Of these John H. Clark became intimately asso- 
ciated with the Baird family for many years. Mr. Clark 
was a native of Maryland, and was a member of various 
western surveys carried on under Government auspices, 
including that of the Mexican Boundary. Miss Lucy 
Baird observes that he was an energetic collector for the 
Smithsonian Museum and, “during his winters in Wash- 
ington was usually a member of our family.” 
Kennerly, a Virginian, and a student of medicine, 
intended to practise his profession in the district from 
which he came. However, his tastes led him to connection 
with Government surveys and finally with the Northwest 
Boundary Survey, where he was associated with George 
Gibbs, the ethnologist. He started for the Eastern States 
in the spring of 1871, was taken ill on the voyage, died, 
and was buried at sea. Bibb formed the third of a rather 
closely allied trio of those early days, though he did not 
enter Government service. 
Earlier in the year Baird had received a letter from 
Professor Louis Agassiz, from which the following extracts 
are taken 
From Louis Agassiz to S. F. Baird. 
My pear Sir,— 
Months have passed away since I received your very kind letter, 
and I should fear to have lost your sympathy did I not feel certain 
you will pardon me for not having answered it earlier when I mention 
the circumstances which prevented me from doing it as I ought to 
have done. But conceive of the position of a naturalist entirely 
devoted to his studies without any other object before him, arriving 
in a world quite new to him, as so full of interesting objects as this 
is, and you will easily imagine how I have been carried away by the 
