SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD. 



By Hugh M. Smith. 



The life, the character, the work of Spencer Fullerton Baird entitle 

 him to recognition in any assemblage and on any occasion where honor 

 is paid to those who have been their country's benefactors through 

 illustrious achievements in science. 



Developing a taste for scientific pursuits at a very early age, and 

 confirmed in those pursuits through the influence of friendships with 

 Agassiz, Audubon, Dana and other leading scientists of the time, 

 Baird was selected as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion when only twenty-seven years old, and there entered on a career 

 devoted to the promotion, diffusion and application of scientific knowl- 

 edge among men, and marked by dignity, sound judgment, fidelity to 

 duty, versatility and general usefulness. 



In the many phases of his intellectual development he resembled 

 Franklin and Cope; in the multiplicity of his public duties and in the 

 diversity of the scientific accomplishments in which he attained emi- 

 nence he had few equals; in founding, organizing and simultaneously 

 directing a number of great national scientific enterprises he was unique 

 among those whose memory is here extolled today. 



To render an adequate account of the branches of scientific endeavor 

 in which he achieved prominence, benefited his own and future gen- 

 erations and added to his country's renown, one would need to be an 

 ornithologist, a mammalogist, an ichthyologist, a herpetologist, an 

 invertebrate zoologist, an anthropologist, a botanist, a geologist, a 

 palaeontologist, a deep-sea explorer, a fishery expert, a fish-culturist, 

 an active administrator of scientific institutions and an adviser of the 

 federal government in scientific affairs, — for Baird was all these and 

 more. 



We freely acknowledge today the debt that science owed Baird 

 alive and now owes his memory, especially for his inestimable services 

 as assistant secretary and later as secretary of the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution, as director of the National Museum and as head of the Com- 

 mission of Fish and Fisheries. Among all the establishments with which 

 he was connected, this last was preeminently and peculiarly his own. 



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