THE PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROFESSOR 
BAIRD. 
By Mr. J. W. Powell, President of the Anthropological Society. 
Baird was one of the learned men of the world, and, to a degree 
perhaps unexampled in history, he was the discoverer of the knowl¬ 
edge he possessed. He knew the birds of the air, from the ptarmi¬ 
gan that lives among everlasting snows, to the humming-bird that 
revels among the orchids of -the tropics ; he knew the beasts of the 
forests and the prairies, and the reptiles that crawl through desert 
sands or slimy marshes; he knew the fishes that scale mountain 
torrents, that bask in quiet lakes, or that journey from zone to zone 
through the deep waters of the sea. In all tliis realm of nature he 
had a minute and comprehensive knowledge that no other man has 
ever acquired. What others have recorded in this field of research 
he knew, and to their discoveries he made a contribution of his own 
so bounteous, so stupendous, that he is recognized as the master of 
systematic zoologists. 
All of Baird’s scientific work is an illustration of modern induc¬ 
tive or scientific reasoning. The inductions or general principles of 
modern science are reached by the accumulation of vast stores of 
facts. He knew how to accumulate facts ; how to reject the trivial 
and select the significant. Modern science is almost buried under 
the debris of observation, the record of facts without meaning, 
the sands of fact that are ground from the rock of truth by the at¬ 
trition of mind; but Baird could walk over the sands and see the 
diamonds. Then he knew how to marshal significant facts into 
systems, and to weld them into fundamental principles. In all his 
works there can be discovered no taint of a priori reasoning or 
syllogistic logic; for in his mind there was no room for controversy, 
and disputation fled before the light of his genius. Formal logic, 
a disease of modern thought,—the contagion of Aristotleina ,—never 
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