March 9. 18S3.] 



SCIENCE. 



123 



FRIDAY, MARCH 0, 1883. 



SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRDA 

 The ancestors of the present secretar}^ of 

 the Smithsonian institution were of English, 

 Scotch, and German origin. The grandparents 

 were Samuel Baird of Pottstown, Penn., and 

 Rebecca Potts. Their son Samuel was a law- 

 yer established 

 at Reading. 

 Penn. , where 

 Spencer Fnller- 

 ton Baird was 

 born Feb. 3, 

 1823. His great- 

 grandfather on 

 his mother's 

 side was the 

 Rev. E 1 i h u 

 Spencer of 

 Trenton, whose 

 pulpit-eloquenee 

 during the wai- 

 for i n d e p e n d - 

 ence brought 

 him the honor of 

 having a price 

 set on his head 

 bj- the British 

 government. 



Samuel Baird 

 was a man of 

 fine culture, a 

 strong thinker, 

 close observer, 

 and lo^'er of 

 nature and out- 

 of-door pu rs uits . 

 He died in 1833 ; but his children, especiallj' 

 his sons William and Spencer, were largely in- 

 fluenced bj- their father's tastes, and early began 

 the collection of specimens in natural history. 

 Thej' worked together ; and there are still, in 

 the museum at Washington, specimens of birds 

 prepared b3' these boj's forty-five years ago, 



^ For the portrait of Professor Baird, here given. Science is 

 Indebted to the liberality of the Photo-engraving company of 

 NewTork. 



by a simple process of evisceration, and then 

 of stuffing the bodj'-cavities with cotton and 

 arsenical soap. The older brother- entered 

 the legal profession, and at the time of his 

 death, in 1872, was U. S. collector of internal 

 revenue at Reading. 



The j-onnger continued his' studies and nat- 

 ural history pursuits without interruption. He 

 entered Dickin- 

 son college in 

 1 sSG, when onlj' 

 thirteen years 

 old, and was 

 g r a d u a t e d in 

 ] 840. He after- 

 \vard carried on 

 some studies in 

 medicine, but 

 never formally 

 completed the 

 course, and re- 

 ceived his de- 

 gree of M.D. 

 honoris causa. 

 His earl^- inter- 

 est in natural 

 history was 

 steadily encour- 

 nged and fos- 

 tered. He was 

 not compelled 

 into a profes- 

 sion, but al- 

 lowed to exer- 

 cise the fullest 

 freedom in re- 

 searches and 

 collections. A 

 strong stimulus was in the friendship of Audu- 

 bon, which he formed as early as 1838, while 

 he was still a student in college. He was only 

 prevented b^- ill health from accompanying 

 Audubon as his secretary on his six-months' 

 expedition to the Yellowstone in 1840. The 

 older naturalist, in 1842, gave the younger 

 the greater part of his collection of birds, in- 

 cluding most of his tj-pes of new species. It 

 was in these early 3-cars, also, that he formed 



