GENERAL MEETINGS. 
69 
advice and opinion amid the clatter of contending voices, it seemed 
almost as if the main features of the scientific gospel of the new era 
had existed in the mind of Baird from the very beginning. His 
thorough apprenticeship in the study of details of structure and their 
expression in systematic classification, as well as his cautious and 
judicial habit of mind, prevented him, notwithstanding his hearty 
recognition of evolutionary processes, from falling into those exuber¬ 
ancies of utterance and hypothesis characteristic of narrowness and 
immaturity which, within the memory of most of us, have enjoyed 
a sort of vogue now happily on the decline. 
Batrachians and Serpents .—Professor Baird’s contributions to 
herpetology began as early as 1849, his first paper being a revision 
of the North American tailed batrachians which appeared in the 
Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Ex¬ 
cluding notices of the work of others in the Annual Record between 
1849 and 1880, he published fourteen papers on this branch of science 
beside nine of which he was the joint author with Charles Girard. 
His activity in original work in this, as in some other directions, 
came to an end with the assumption of the burden of administrative 
work required by the organization and development of the Fish 
Commission. 
Many of his herpetological papers were elaborate studies. One 
of the most important of the early memoirs was that on the reptiles 
of Stansbury’s expedition to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and 
another, that on those collected by the United States exploring ex¬ 
pedition under Wilkes. The catalogue of North American Reptiles 
in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution is a classical work, 
serving to the present day as a text-book for students of herpetology. 
In 1859 appeared his great study of the reptiles collected by the 
parties engaged in the explorations for a Pacific railroad, a monu¬ 
ment of patient research and discriminating analysis. After this 
his contributions to the subject were mostly short papers or an¬ 
nouncements of new or interesting facts. 
At the time Professor Baird began his studies of the amphibia 
little had been done for herpetology in America. The classical work 
of Holbrook contained little more than descriptions of Southern 
species and the work of Dumeril and Bibron was equally meagre. 
Immense collections were placed in Baird’s hands from the Western 
plains, and the work upon the^e was necessarily in great part orig- 
