RELATIONS BETWEEN PROFESSOR BAIRD AND 
PARTICIPATING SOCIETIES. 
By Mr. Garrick Mallery, President of the Philosophical Society. 
DIES AND Gentlemen : 
During several winters before 1871, a club, with commingled 
social and scientific purposes, used to meet in this city at the houses 
of its members. A single paper on some scientific subject was read, 
usually by the host of the evening, following which was a discussion. 
Supper was always provided. The title of the club only related 
to the night of meeting, Saturday, and the organization was so 
loose that several of the survivors among the regular participants 
at the meetings do not now remember whether they were actual 
members, or indeed that there was a definite membership. As the 
city of Washington emerged from the condition of a Southern vil¬ 
lage, and the benign policy of the Government increased the num¬ 
ber and force of the scientific institutions at the Capital, the need of 
an organization which should bring scientific men together on an 
equal footing and give more time to papers and their discussion 
became manifest. To meet this want the attendants of the Saturday- 
Night Club, on March 13th, 1871, formed the Philosophical Society 
of Washington, its object, in the words of the call, being “the free 
exchange of views on scientific subjects and the promotion of scien¬ 
tific inquiry among its members.” 
The term “Philosophical,” as the first president of the Society, 
Joseph Henry, stated in his first address, was chosen after consider¬ 
able deliberation, “not to denote, as it generally does in the present 
day, the unbounded field of speculative thought, which embraces 
the possible as well as the actual of existence, but to be used in its 
j-estricted sense to indicate those branches of knowledge that relate 
to the positive facts and laws of the physical and moral universe.” 
Of the forty-three gentlemen who signed the call twenty-one are 
now dead. Professor Baird was prominent among the founders, 
and served continuously as a member of the General Committee from 
the organization to November 10th, 1877, and from that date until 
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