352 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
From Dr. Henry Bryant ** to Spencer F. Baird. 
Lyme Recis (ENGLAND) May 9, 1865. 
My pDEAR Pror. 
I have not written to you for some time at least I have written 
very briefly and therefore intend the present to make up for it. In 
the first place I will premise that you did not act with your usual 
wisdom in not telling Verreaux to send me word of Lafresnaye’s 
collection and in consequence of the length of time it took for you 
to receive in the first place, and I in the second place, his letter to 
you announcing the sale, I shall be unable I presume to get to Falaise 
in time to make any purchase. I am very sorry as I had fully counted 
on purchasing all his American types. 
From Dr. Henry Bryant to Spencer F. Baird. 
Paris—18 juillet, 1865. 
Dear Pror. 
I think in my last I told you I would make the attempt to get 
the Falaise (in) time enough to attend the sale of the La Fresnaye 
collection. I could not find anybody who knew the way there. 
34 Henry Bryant, M.D., born in Boston, May 12, 1820; graduated 
at Harvard in 1840, and in medicine in 1843, studied in Paris and 
returned to America in 1847. He married Elisabeth B. Sohier in 
1848; was active in the medical service of the army during the early 
part of the Civil War, but was obliged to leave the service on account 
of ill health in 1863. His physical condition was never of the best 
and occasioned him to spend much time in the open air, which he 
utilized in the collection and study of birds. In 1866 he purchased 
the La Fresnaye collection of birds referred to in the above letters 
and gave it to the Boston Society. It was regarded by Baird as the 
most important foreign collection for American students, no other 
containing so many original types of American species. Dr. Bryant 
died while on a collecting tour in Porto Rico, February 2, 1868. The 
La Fresnaye collection has since been deposited in the Museum of 
Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass. 
