406 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
October. On November 6th he travelled from Washing- 
ton to Cambridge, where on the 8th the ancient University 
of Harvard honored herself by conferring upon him the 
degree of Doctor of Laws. He attended the Boston meet- 
ing of the National Academy of Sciences, and returned 
to Washington November roth, for the last time. Baird 
by this time was fully aware that his physical condition 
was serious. At the annual meeting of the Board of 
Regents in 1887, he presented the case and, in view of 
his possible disability and at his recommendation, action 
was taken accordingly. The tradition has been that 
naturalists and physicists should alternate as successive 
secretaries of the Smithsonian Institution, thus giving 
each branch of Science its turn at the highest honor 
American science has to bestow. In accordance with 
this unwritten understanding, Professor Samuel Pierpont 
Langley, astronomer and physicist, was appointed Assis- 
tant Secretary in charge of the Smithsonian activities 
(with the tacit right of succession) and Doctor George 
Brown Goode put in charge of the Museum and natural 
history work. 
Medical advice to Baird was that he must relinquish 
work entirely for at least a year to have any hope of 
survival. He consented to retire to Elizabethtown, N. Y., 
in the Adirondack region, where he arrived on the 2oth 
of May. There was a superficial improvement in his 
condition, his recovery was rumored, and letters of 
affectionate congratulation began to pour in. It is doubt- 
ful if he himself was deceived, but in July he left the 
Adirondacks for Wood’s Hole, the scene of his hardest 
labors and most striking economic successes. 
Here he dictated a letter occasionally and waited for 
better days. 
