SPENCER
FULLERTON BAIRD
I.
No
name occupies a more honorable place in the annals of American
science than that of Professor Baird. His personal contributions
to systematic biology were of great extent. His influence in
inspiring and training men to enter the field of natural history
was very potent. As an organizer, working at a most fortunate
time, he knew how to utilize his extraordinary opportunities,
and he has left his impress forever fixed upon the scientific
and educational institutions of the United States, more especially
upon those under
government control.
He was
one of those rare men, perhaps more frequently met with in
the New World than elsewhere, who give the impression of being
able to succeed in whatever they undertake. Although he chose
to be a naturalist , and of necessity became an administrator,
no one who knew him could doubt that he would have been equally
eminent as a lawyer, physician, mechanic, historian, business
man, soldier, or statesman.
II.
It is always
interesting to search for the sources of intellectual force
and capacity, especially so in this country, where the races
of the Old World have mingled with such rapidity and in such
volume as to develop very remarkable phases in the problem
of heredity.
For an
inquiry of this kind there is excellent material in the case
of Professor Baird, for though he gave little attention to
such matters in his later busy life, there is still in existence
an elaborate "genealogical tree," prepared by himself at the
age of sixteen, by the aid of which it has been practicable
to identify his ancestors up to and including all those of
the fifth degree, thirty in number, and in many lines far
beyond.
His grandparents
were all the children of colonial Pennsylvanians. He was emphatically
an American, for over eighty per centum of his progenitors
in the sixth degree were living in the colonies during the
seventeenth century. Out of the total number of thirty-two,
one, or perhaps two, were of Swedish blood; one was a Huguenot,
and one or two others from the Palatinate -- companions of
Pastorius in the founding of the first German community in
America. The others were either natives of Great Britain or
their descendants established in the American colonies. Of
these there were several of Scotch, Irish, or Scotch-Irish
blood, and one or two from Wales.
Although
in one sense only agencies in the concentration and transmission
of the various traits derived from previous generations ,
his immediate ancestors -- with their personal traits, the
results of education and environment -- were those who had
the most direct influence upon his character.
His father,
Samuel Baird (1786-1833), was a lawyer, a man of fine culture,
an independent and original thinker, and a lover of nature
and of outdoor sports.
His mother,
Lydia McFunn Biddle (1797-1861), who survived her husband
nearly forty years [ either the author was incorrect with
his dates or subtracted incorrectly as the period 1833 to
1861 amounts to only twenty-eight years], was a woman of fine
executive powers, fascinating manners, and of a sunny and
equable temperament.
His father's
father, Samuel Baird, served as a quartermaster in the Revolutionary
Army; he was a surveyor in the opening of coal-mines in eastern
Pennsylvania, in association with his cousin, Colonel Thomas
Potts, who was the first to discover the valuable properties
of anthracite coal, and who interested Franklin and Rittenhouse
in devising methods for its use as a fuel. Samuel Baird's
father, Thomas Baird, was of Scotch-Irish origin; he came
to the colony before the middle of the century, and following
the current of westward travel, settled as a frontiersman
in the beautiful Cumberland Valley, near the present site
of Chambersburg, the westernmost of the Pennsylvania settlements,
and at the very verge of civilization. His wife, Mary Douglass,
was of the same race. At the close of the Revolution, her
husband having died, she, with all her children but the eldest
son, joined the train of emigrants which for a quarter of
a century she had seen wending westward past her door, and
removed to the new territory of Kentucky, and later to Fort
Vincennes, Indiana, where she was still living in 1785.
His father's
mother, Rebecca Potts (1753-1830), was the daughter of Thomas
Potts (1721-'62), of Colebrookdale, and granddaughter of Thomas
Potts, who came from Wales to Germantown early in the eighteenth
century, and was a pioneer in the development of the American
iron industry. His descendants owned the region in which the
American Army was encamped in 1778. The Valley Forge belonged
to Colonel Dewees, the husband of Rebecca Potts' sister, in
whose house she was living at that time, while Washington
occupied the home of her uncle on the other side of Valley
Creek. During that long winter Mrs. Washington taught her
how to net, and gave her a silver netting-needle, still treasured
by the family. Her mother was the daughter of William Pyewell
(1685-1769), of Philadelphia, one of the earliest wardens
of the Christ Church, and her grandmothers were Magdelen Robeson,
descended from Swedish colonies founded on the Delaware, and
Mary Rutter, of Huguenot origin.
Professor
Baird's mother's father, William McFunn Biddle, was the son
of William McFunn, an officer of the British Navy, who was
present with the fleet at the siege of Quebec, and while stationed
on the Delaware was married, in 1752, to Lydia Biddle. Ordered
to duty at Antigua, he contracted a disease which caused his
death at Philadelphia, in 1768. In that most interesting volume,
the "Autobiography of Charles Biddle," are occasional references
to Captain McFunn, who was evidently a bluff and hardy English
seaman of the old heroic type. His son, William Biddle McFunn,
became, by transposition of his two last names, William McFunn
Biddle. He was a banker, an accomplished musician, and the
friend of Robert Morris, and became involved in some of the
ambitious projects which "the financier of the Revolution"
organized in the early days of the Republic -- especially
the American Land Company. At one time the richest young man
in Philadelphia, he went with Morris to a debtor's cell, where
he remained until relieved by the passage of the first United
States bankrupt law, in 1800. His mother, Lydia Biddle, belonged
to an old Philadelphia family, for many generations prominent
in commercial and banking enterprises and as officers in the
Army and Navy, the descendants of WIlliam Biddle, one of the
first Quaker colonists of Pennsylvania. She was descended
maternaly from Nicholas Scull, the friend of Franklin, one
of the earliest members of the American Philosophical Society,
and the first surveyor- general of Philadelphia.
His mother's
mother, Lydia Spencer Biddle, survived her husband for half
a century, and died in 1858 at the age of ninety-three. Her
memories of the Revolution were vivid, for her father was
the patriot preacher Elihu Spencer, who had been a chaplain
in the French and Indian Wars, and was despatched by Congress
to North Carolina to aid in winning over the Scotch colonists,
who were slow to abandon their allegiance to the British Crown
-- a man whose eloquence rendered him so conspicuous that
a reward was offered his head. Her sister's husband, Jonathan
Dickinson Sergeant, was a member of the Continental Congress.
As a young lady at Trenton she talked with General Mercer
just before he marched to his death at Princeton, and on Christmas
night in 1776 saw Washington depart for the crossing of the
Delaware. Her father was the brother of General Joseph Spencer
of the Revolution, second cousin to Timothy Edwards, the great
New England theologian, and own cousin to John and Edward
Brainerd, missionaries to the Indians; she was aunt to John
and Thomas Sergeant, of Philadelphia, eminent lawyers, the
former a candidate for Vice-President with Clay in 1832, the
latter judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Through
her mother, Joanna Eaton, she was descended from Thomas Eaton,
one of the earliest American Quakers, who came to Rhode Island
in 1761, and also from Thomas Wardell and Isaac Perkins, first-comers
to Massachusetts Bay (1630-'35), who, as disciples of Anne
Hutchinson in the Antinomian controversy, were banished from
the colony as heretics, and went with the Reverend John Wheelwright
beyond the limits of the colony into the forests of New Hampshire.
Among her nearest of kin, the children and grandchildren of
her aunts, were all the LeContes, eminent in science as zoologists,
geologists, and chemists; John Mcpherson Berrien, of Georgia,
the "American Cicero," early Attorney-General of the United
States and Regent of the Smithsonian Institution; as well
as Admiral Montgomery and Commodore Berrien of the United
States Navy.
These were
all representative men and women, leaders in the communities
in which they lived, a group even more remarkable for their
abilities than for their diversity in origin and character.
Many of them were Quakers, but there were also Churchmen,
Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Among them were soldiers, sailors,
clergymen, lawyers, financiers, surveyors, miners, farmers,
mechanics, military officers, British and American; patriots
and loyalists, Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Republicans.
With such ancestral resources to draw upon, it is not strange
that Professor Baird should have been a man of varied and
commanding abilities. His administrative capacity, his power
of directing and controlling men, and his personal charm of
manner, came to him perhaps chiefly from his mother; while
to his father's family he owed his love of outdoor life, his
taste for the study of nature, and his magnificent physique,
a heritag from generations fo pioneers and frontiersmen. Those
who knew best may be disposed to attribute to his Quaker ancestry
his quiet and unasssuming manner, his dislike for publicity,
and his preference for a simple garb of gray.
III.
SPENCER
FULLERTON BAIRD was born February 23, 1823, in Reading, Pennsylvania.
His father died when he was ten years old, and his mother
soon removed with her family to Carlisle, a village in the
beautiful Cumberland Valley, which was the seat of Dickinson
College and of a government military post, and the home of
many people of culture and refinement.
When he
was eleven he was sent to a Friends' boarding-school, kept
by Doctor McGraw, in Port Deposit, Maryland; a year later
entered the grammar school in Carlisle, and in 1836 Dickinson
College, from which he was graduated in 1840, at the age of
seventeen.
His interest
in collecting and classifying facts and in observing nature
began when he was still a boy. His early note-books contain
systematic lists of various kinds. He gathered specimens of
the wood and leaves of plants, and at the age of fourteen
joined his elder brother William, who had similar tastes,
in making a collection of the game-birds of Cumberland county.
Specimens prepared by these boys sixty years ago are still
preserved in the National Museum.
After leaving
college, since he was too young to enter any profession, he
was allowed to follow his own tastes for a time, and his inclination
for science developed in such a remarkable manner that his
mother felt that she was justified in allowing him to devote
himself for several years to his favorite pursuits. There
were at that time no schools for young naturalists, and his
education was in a large degree self-directed. He began to
read medicine, attended a course of lectures at the College
of Physicians and Surgeons in New York in the winter of 1841-'42,
and made excursions, often on foot, in search of specimens
and to visit collections. He made long visits to friends in
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and thus saw the museums
and important private collections and became familiar with
what were at that time the principal centers of learning.
In those days were formed many of the friendships and scientific
partnerships which influenced his after life.
Among his
early companions and correspondents were George N. Lawrence
(1841), Charles Pickering and John Torrey (1842), John Cassin
and James D. Dana (1843), Thomas M. Brewer, Stephen S. Haldeman,
Joseph Leidy, and Frederick E. Melsheimer (1844), and Philo
R. Hoy and John S. Newberry (1850).
Still earlier
was his friendship with Audubon, with whom he began a correspondence
in 1838, and from whom he received instruction in making drawings
of birds; and it was to him, and still more to his own kinsman,
Major John LeConte, one of the early Southern naturalists,
that was due his determination to devote his life to natural
history.
In 1843
he translated Ehrenberg's work on the corals of the Red Sea
for Dana, who was then engaged upon his report for the Wilkes
exploring expedition. In 1846 he appears to have been occupied
in the preparation of a synonymy of North American birds,
and to have visited Boston to consult in the libraries of
Amos Binney and the Boston Society of Natural History certain
books not to be found in Philadelphia. That he was already
at that time a trained student is shown by the fact that the
material then gathered was utilized by him twelve years later
in his "Birds of North America."
During
all this time he was engaged in organizing a private cabinet
of natural history, taking long excursions through the mountains
of Pennsylvania; in making dissections and preparing slides
for the microscope; and in preserving specimens, most of which
are still in existence and available for scientific study
in the National Museum.
In 1841
he walked 420 miles in twenty-one days; on the last day 60
miles between daylight and rest. In 1842 he walked more than
2100 miles. In the course of these excursions he visited Audubon,
Haldeman, Melsheimer, and Morris, in order to examine their
collections. His fine physique and capacity for work in after
days were perhaps due in part to these years of outdoor life.
I find
in his note-book a memorandum that on his birthday in 1840,
at the age of seventeen, his height was five feet ten and
a quarter inches; a year later he measured five feet eleven
and three quarters inches, and weighed one hundred and fifty
pounds. During his long walk in the following fall he made
some curious experiments upon himself. At night, after carrying
a load of forty pounds for ten miles, he measured five feet
eleven and a quarter inches, and the next morning six feet,
showing that his height had been compressed by weight three
quarters of an inch.
His home
studies were carried on for a number of years, and were scarcely
interrupted by his election in 1846 to the chair of natural
history and chemistry in Dickinson College. In this capacity
he taught the seniors physiology; the sophomores, geometry;
freshmen, zoology; and the preparatory students, something
else. He found time, however, to carry on the work begun in
previous years and to make each summer an extended collecting
expedition: in 1847, to the Adirondacks; in 1848, to Ohio,
to collect, in company with Doctor Kirtland, from the original
localities of the types, the species described by him in his
work on the fishes of Ohio; in 1849, to the mountains of Virginia,
with C. B. R. Kennerly; and in 1850, to Lake Champlain and
Lake Ontario.
He remained
in Carlisle until 1850, and there he married, in 1846, Mary
Helen Churchill, the daughter of General Sylvester Churchill,
Inspector-General United States Army. He used to say that
his wife won his heart as a girl by the beautiful labels she
wrote for his collections, and she was always afterward his
companion and assistant in his work.
The coming
of Agassiz to America in 1846 was an inspiration to the young
naturalist. One of the first great works projected by the
Swiss savant was a memoir upon the freshwater fishes of North
America, in the authorship of which Professor Baird was to
be his associate -- a work which was never completed.
Agassiz
did not establish himself in Cambridge until 1848, and to
Baird should belong the credit of having introduced into American
schools the system of laboratory practice and field exploration
as an essential part of instruction in natural history. Doctor
Moncure D. Conway, one of his pupils, has often spoken to
me of his fascinating explanations of natural phenomena, and
how the contagion of his enthusiasm spread among his pupils,
who frequently followed him over the hills twenty or thirty
miles a day. Once, while collecting insects in the field,
they were surrounded by a party of German farmers, who thought
they were escaped lunatics and proposed to take them to an
asylum.
IV.
His mentor
at this time was the Honorable George P. Marsh, of Vermont,
who was always his friend and admirer, and to him Professor
Baird always felt that he owed his real start in life. Mr.
Marsh, feeling that his prot‚g‚ was disposed to bury himself
in the technicalities of a specialty, insisted that he should
undertake to translate and edit an edition of the "Iconographic
Cyclopaedia," a version Heck's "Bilder-Atlas," published in
connection with the famous "Konservations-Lexikon" of Brockhaus.
This, his first extensive literary task, though exceedingly
laborious and confining to a man so young and entirely untrained
in literary methods, was efficiently and rapidly performed.
The result was a great expansion in his tastes and sympathies,
while the training and confidence which he acquired served
as an excellent preparation for the tremendous literary tasks
which he undertook without hesitation in later years.
It was
also to Mr. Marsh, who was one of the earliest Smithsonian
Regents, that he owed his election as Assistant Secretary
of the Institution, then recently organized. His selection,
as is indicated by a statement in Professor Henry's fifth
report, was due quite as much to his training in editorial
methods as to his professional acquirements. His appointment,
as is there stated, was made at that time more particularly
that he might have charge of the publications, and that the
Institution might take advantage of the ample experience which
he had gained in editorial work.
He first
met Henry, as his diary shows, on July 167, 1848, visited
with him the building then being constructed, and undertook
to collect natural history objects for the Smithsonian.
The Regents
of the Institution did not, of course, appreciate the fact
that he had originated, in connection with his work upon his
own private collections, a system of museum administration
which was to be of the utmost value in the management of the
great National Museum, which developed so rapidly under his
charge.
All the
efficient methods which are now in use in the National Museum
were practiced in the little museum which he had organized
at home, and which he brought with him to form the nucleus
of the Smithsonian collection. Among the treasures of his
cabinet, which filled two large freight cars, and which are
still cherished by the Institution, were a number of the choicest
bird skins collected by Audubon, who entertained for him a
sincere friendship from the time when he proposed to him,
a boy of nineteen, that he accompany him on a voyage to the
headwaters of the Missouri, and who sought him as a partner
in the preparation of the great work "Quadrupeds of North
America."
The position
of Assistant Secretary was accepted July 5, 1850, and on the
third of October, at the age of twenty-seven years, he entered
upon his life-work in connection with the Smithsonian Institution.
V.
IT would
be interesting to dwell upon the details of his work, but
his life was so full of interests that it is only by careful
condensation that even an adequate outline of its eventful
features can be presented in this volume.
There were
several distinct activities in his career, distributed somewhat
as follows: (1) a period of twenty-six years (1843-'69) devoted
to laborious investigation of the vertebrate fauna of North
America; (2) forty years (1840-'80) of continuous contribution
to scientific literature, of which at least ten were devoted
to scientific editorship; (3) four years (1846-'50) devoted
to educational work; (4) forty-one years (1846-'87) years
devoted to the encouragement and promotion of scientific enterprises,
and the development of new workers among the young men with
whom he was brought into contact; (5) thirty-seven years (1850-'87)
devoted to administrative work as an officer of the Smithsonian
Institution and in charge of the scientific collections of
the government - twenty-eight years (1850-'78) its principal
executive officer and nine years (1878-'87) the Secretary
and responsible head of the Institution; (6) sixteen years
(1871-'78) as head of the United States Fish Commission, a
philanthropic labor for the increase of the food supply of
the world, and incidentally for the promotion of the interests
of biological and physical investigation.
