GENERAI. MEETINGS. 73 
thus gathered from all parts of the world, some has gone to enrich 
American institutions of learning, and some has been gathered into 
the National Museum—the outgrowth of Baird’s organizing genius 
and a splendid monument to his memory. 
The hills of the land stretch not so far as the billows of the sea; 
the heights of the mountains are not so great as the depths of the 
ocean; and so the world was unknown until this greater region was 
explored. The treasures of the land did not satisfy the desires of 
Baird; he must also have the treasures of the sea, and so he organ- 
ized a fish commission, with its great laboratories and vessels of 
research. ° 
“What hid’st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells, 
Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main ? 
Pale, glistening pearls and rainbow-colored shells, 
Bright things which gleam unreck’d of, and in vain. 
Keep, keep thy riches, melancholy sea! 
We ask not such from thee.” 
What the scholar asked of the sea was all its forms of life, its 
organisms minute and lowly, its crawling articulates, its pearl- 
housed mollusks, its fishes that swim in armies, and its leviathans 
that prowl among the waves—the life of the reedy shore, the life 
of the ocean-current, and the life of the deep sea. So, with many 
ingenious appliances, he and his lieutenants sailed away to explore 
the ocean’s mystery. 
So the Fish Commission was an agency of research; but it was 
more; he made it an agency by which science is applied to the 
relief of the wants of mankind, by which a cheap, nutritious, health- 
ful, and luxurious food is to be given to the millions of men. He 
affirmed that for the production of food an acre of water is more 
than equal to ten acres of land, thus giving to the gloomy doctrine 
of Malthus its ultimate refutation, and tearing away the veil of 
despair from the horizon of the poor; for, when the sea shall serve 
man with all the food that can be gathered from its broad expanse, 
the land cannot contain the millions whom it is thus possible to 
supply. 
In the research thus organized the materials for the work of 
other scientific men were gathered. When a great genius reads to 
the world a chapter from the book of nature the story is so beau- 
tiful that many are stimulated to search in the same field for new 
chapters of the same story. Thus it was that the publication of 
