GENERAL MEETINGS. 
67 
completed, this work has received unstinted praise from all compe¬ 
tent to estimate it. It is said on excellent authority that no other 
single work on American birds has made so profound an impression 
on foreign ornithologists, notwithstanding the fact that circum¬ 
stances prevented it from being made complete. 
Although in his systematic work Professor Baird, like other 
naturalists, built partly on the scientific foundations laid by his 
predecessors and contemporaries, always with due acknowledge¬ 
ment, the high value of his work in this direction was largely 
due to an unerring instinct which enabled him to recognize and 
confirm the best features of the work of others and by adding ma¬ 
terial from his own lines of original research to combine the whole 
into a fabric which was a distinct advance on anything previously 
offered to the scientific world. 
While the bent of his genius led him, in this as in other depart¬ 
ments, to devote a main proportion of his work to the systematic 
biology which was the need of the time, and which, with the explora¬ 
tion and description upon which it is based, must always precede 
and lay the track for the theoretical biology more in vogue to-day, 
it must not be supposed that the work of Baird was confined to de¬ 
scriptive and systematic work. With the latter in his publications 
are combined a host of biographical data such as the field naturalist 
revels in. One of the earliest and most pregnant papers bearing 
on mutations of specific forms which have been contributed to the 
literature of evolution by American biologists is to be fouud in his 
article on the “Distribution and Migrations of North American 
Birds” published in the American Journal of Science in 1866.* 
In this paper, an abstract of a memoir presented to the National 
Academy of Sciences in 1865, are to be found the germs of much 
of the admirable work which has since been elaborated by other 
biologists on the correlation of geographical distribution and the 
peculiarities of the environment, with the modifications of color, 
size, and structure in the forms of animal life, called species. 
Unlike some of his contemporaries twenty years ago, the views of 
Darwin excited in him no reaction of mind against the hypotheses 
then novel and revolutionary. His friendly reception of the new 
theories was so quiet and undisturbed that, to a novice seeking his 
*Am. Jour. Sci. and Arts, 2nd Series, XII, pp. 78-90, 184-92, 337-47, 
1866. 
