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Encyclopedia Britannica

BAIRD, SPENCER FULLERTON (1823--1887)

This article appears in Volume V03, Page 225 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BAI-BAR

BAIRD, SPENCER FULLERTON (1823--1887) ,. American naturalist, was born in Reading,

Pennsylvania

PENNSYLVANIA
PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF

, on the 3rd of
February 1823. He graduated at Dickinson College,

Carlisle

CARLISLE
CARLISLE, EARLS OF

Pennsylvania

PENNSYLVANIA
PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF

in 184o, and next year made an ornithological excursion through the mountains of Pennsylvania, walking, says one of his biographers, " 400 M. in twenty-one days, and the last day 6o m." In 1838 he met J. J. Audubon, and thenceforward his studies were largely ornithological, Audubon giving him a part of his own collection of birds. After studying medicine for a time, Baird became professor of natural history in Dickinson College in 1845, assuming also the duties of the chair of chemistry, and giving instruction in physiology and mathematics. This variety of duties in a small college tended to give him that breadth of scientific

interest

INTEREST

which characterized him through life, and made him perhaps the most representative general man of science in America. For the long period between 1850 and 1878 he was assistant-secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washing-ton, and on the death of Joseph Henry he became secretary. From 1871 till his death he was U.S.

Commissioner

COMMISSIONER

of Fish and Fisheries. While an officer of the Smithsonian, Baird's duties included the superintendence of the labour of workers in widely different lines. Thus, apart from his assistance to others, his own studies and published writings cover a broad range: iconography, geology,

mineralogy

MINERALOGY

, botany, anthropology, general

zoology

ZOOLOGY (from Gr. Nov, a living thing, and ?byos, theory)

, and, in particular, ornithology; while for a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of years he edited an annual volume summarizing progress in all scientific lines of investigation. He gave general superintendence, between 185o and 186o, to several government expeditions for scientific exploration of the western territories of the United States, preparing for them a

manual

MANUAL

of Instructions to Collectors. Of his own publications, the bibliography by G. Brown Goode, from 1843 to the close of 1882, includes 1063 entries, of which 775 were short articles in his Annual Record. His most important volumes, on the whole, were Birds, in the

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of reports of explorations and surveys for a railway route from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean (1858), of which Dr Elliott Cones says (as quoted in the Popular Science Monthly, xxxiii. 553) that it " exerted an influence perhaps stronger and more widely felt than that of any of its predecessors, Audubon's and Wilson's not excepted, and marked an epoch in the history of American ornithology "; Mammals of North America: Descriptions based on Collections in the Smithsonian Institution (Philadelphia, 1859) ; and the monumental

work

WORK

(with Thomas Mayo Brewer and Robert Ridgway) History of North American Birds (Boston, 18751884; " Land Birds," 3 vols., " Water Birds," 2 vols). He died on the 19th of August 1887 at the

great

GREAT

marine biological laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, an institution which was largely the result of his own efforts, and which has exercised a wide effect upon both scientific and economic ichthyology.

End of Article: BAIRD, SPENCER FULLERTON (1823--1887)

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