Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/68

64 present memoir at a very early age became interested not merely in killing birds, but in studying them. These brothers in their early 'teens' began to form a collection, of which they were joint proprietors. This was really the nucleus of what is now the National Museum series, and possesses a historical interest in relation to the museum similar to that possessed by the Sloane collections in relation to the British Museum. It is said that some of the early specimens were prepared 'by the simple process of evisceration, followed by stuffing the body cavities full of cotton and arsenical soap'; but the later ones were admirably prepared, and all are alike precious to those who are interested in the foundations of American ornithology.

Spencer Baird was ready to enter Dickinson College a year before he actually did so; but Miss Baird informs me that he used to say that he regretted that he had not been kept back longer, as he thought that a boy of thirteen was mentally too immature to reap the full benefit of a college course. The opportunities for scientific study in the college were, of course, very small in those days; but there is no doubt that Baird at this time had fully acquired the 'scientific spirit,' and all he needed was reasonable opportunity. His diary, beginning in 1838, when he was only fifteen years old, shows the same close observation and painstaking exactness which characterized the work of his later years. Thus we read on May 25, 1839:

Another entry in the diary reads:

A later note, dated December 1842, states that the last-mentioned woodpecker was apparently a distinct species, and was named after Baird by J. G. Bell, of New York. 'It was on a high horizontal limb in the first bottom.'

Dickinson College must have been somewhat in advance of the times, for lectures on zoology were offered. The diary under June 18, 1839, has the record, 'Attended one of Mr. Hamilton's lectures on zoology to the senior class in the afternoon.' Baird was then a junior, but no one could deny his fitness to rank with the seniors in zoology.

After leaving college, Baird continued his natural history studies with unabating zeal, and it is evident that at this time his mission in