Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/564

548 hundred miles. He unquestionably derived much, benefit in bis studies from his intercourse with Audubon, which began in 1838, He contributed many facts and specimens for the "History of North American Quadrupeds" and the "Ornithological Biography." Audubon gave him a considerable part of his collection of birds. He had intended to accompany Audubon as his secretary in his six months' expedition to the Yellowstone in 1840, but was prevented by ill-health.

He read medicine, and attended a winter course of lectures at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1842; but he never formally completed the course, and the degree which he received in 1848 from the Philadelphia Medical College was an honorary one. In 1845 he was made Professor of Natural History in Dickinson College, to which chair Chemistry was afterward added. In this position—teaching the seniors in physiology, the sophomores in geometry, and the freshmen in zoölogy—he also found time to keep up his scientific researches, and to make long collecting expeditions to the Adirondacks in 1847; to Ohio in 1848, for the collection of types of the fishes of the State; to the mountains of Virginia in 1849; and to Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario in 1850. "In his own collections during this period," says the author of a tribute in "The Nation," "were developed those business-like methods of arrangement and detail for facilitating study which were subsequently adopted and extended, not only in the institutions which grew up under his supervision, but by nearly all other American scientific museums, and which form a system that for usefulness and efficiency has no parallel in any foreign museum up to the present moment."

In 1850 Prof. Baird was appointed, upon the recommendation of the Hon. George P. Marsh, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In this position he was brought into immediate relations with Prof. Henry, under whose inspiration the institution was just getting fully under way. It was the ambition of that chief to make the influence of the institution diffusive rather than concentrative. It was to be the depository of all the collections which should come into the hands of the Government. Prof. Henry would not have it to monopolize these collections or be so managed that only those might enjoy the advantages to be derived from their study who should be immediately connected with it; but he considered that, while in the study of the specimens and the publication and dissemination of the results it might properly join forces with the Government and with private persons, its part of the labor and expense should be as purely supplementary to other agencies as circumstances might permit. "The policy of the institution under Henry was to disperse as widely and freely as possible the worked-up material, and to enlist in the process of