30 



Specie cr F. Baird. 



He was granted the privileges of the floor 

 in the Senate and the House, but he never 

 exercised them. He did not Hke to dine 

 out with foreign ministers and Government 

 officials, though his rare powers of conver- 

 sation and his official position would have 

 made him doubly welcome there. He was 

 exceedingly averse to appearing in public 

 meetings. I never saw him on a public plat- 

 form but once, and he stipulated then that 

 he must not be called upon nor mentioned. 

 When he attended the National Academy or 

 the American Association he would usually 

 be seen in the lobby rather than in the ses- 

 sions. He refused the presidency of the 

 latter society at the Portland meeting from 

 his aversion to standing before assemblies. 

 When asked if he would attend various cele- 

 brations to which he was invited, he gener- 

 ally replied: 'What do you suppose they 

 would care for my presence ?' Of all the 

 tickets which he received to stage seats on 

 great occasions, and free seats for great 

 events, he used scarcely one per cent. He 

 attended neither church nor theatre for a 

 dozen years. Barnum's circus was the one 

 only large gathering which he loved to fre- 

 quent. 'I don't care what the rest of you 

 do; I am going to the circus this afternoon,' 

 he exultingly exclaimed one day a few sum- 

 mers ago. The way he threw off care that 

 day was grand. He never courted the favor 

 of the President, Senators, or Congressmen, 

 and he felt so unequal to paying them the 

 attention he considered them to deserve 

 that he sometimes tried to delegate the task. 

 And yet the intermediaries, whom the Pro- 

 fessor evidently considered very important, 

 as I have been told, were regarded by the 

 legislators only as so many errand boys. 



"To me the calmness with which he at 

 last faced the inevitable was amazing. For 

 months he knew his condition and the pro- 

 gress of his disease even better than his 

 physicians. Quietly he arranged his estate, 

 selected his successors in all three institu- 

 tions, gave certain confidential directions in 



the interest of his family, but he tried to 

 conceal from them his expected departure. 

 There was no crucifix, no priest, no religious 

 ceremony, no tears, no murmur, no farewell. 

 Only when he had gone was it discovered 

 to what marvellous perfection he had 

 brought his business arrangements. Only 

 then did we learn many things that had been 

 his secrets for months. To my mind even 

 death quailed before him, and, as had oc- 

 curred so often in his life, so this last visitor, 

 which came as an enemy, melted into a 

 friend. AUwascalm, peaceful and sublime." 

 And now what shall be said of the genius 

 of the man? for he had undoubted genius. 

 In his case genius can hardly be defined as 

 the capacity for hard work. It would per- 

 haps be hard to find a brain worker whose 

 results great or small were achieved with 

 less conscious effort. 



Baird's genius was akin to Shakespeare's, 

 although displaying itself in another field. 

 It was due to his clear insight into his sub- 

 ject, his ready apprehension of the harmony 

 that pervades all nature, of the measure of 

 relationship and divergence that assigns the 

 proper place to each group of plants or 

 animals and to each member within a group; 

 in fact to his clear broad grasp of the sub- 

 ject in all its relations. 



Baird's clear insight in this field can no 

 more be attributed to hard work than Shake- 

 speare's marvellous insight into man's char- 

 acter, and the mainsprings and motives of 

 conduct. The one or the other may have 

 overworked himself by too long a strain 

 upon his physical powers, but the quality of 

 the work done was in both cases the result 

 of clear instinctive insight exerted without 

 conscious effort, but necessarily not without 

 a certain measure of laborious preparation. 

 What the specialist in any department of 

 research might have acquired by the labors 

 of a lifetime, could be summed up and 

 valued by Baird almost at a glance, and its 

 proper place assigned to it in the system- 

 ized knowledge of the age. 



