Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/72

 68 and revising the nomenclature of seven species, to bring it in accord with the strict law of priority. This edition was by S. F. Baird alone, William Baird having entered upon the practise of law, and given up active participation in scientific pursuits.

It is said that a prophet is likely to be without honor in his own country; but Baird was one of those rare men who, without pushing themselves forward, succeed in enlisting the sympathy and support of all those about them. An amusing story is told, that once he was engaged in hunting for Indian arrow-heads and other remains in a field, and some men working in an adjoining field stopped to see what he could be about. After watching him for some time, they concluded that he was an escaped lunatic, and, procuring a rope, approached with the intention of capturing him. Baird, looking up, saw them coming, and immediately began to exhibit to them his finds, and explain about the past history of the Indian tribes. In a moment, he was giving a lecture on anthropology to a thoroughly interested and admiring audience, and it is reputed that some of them subsequently took up the same study. Similarly, the doubts which may have been entertained by his family and friends faded away, and Dickinson College, in his own home town, was glad to elect him professor of natural history in 1845, when he was but twenty-two years of age.

The appointment at first was little more than a token of regard, for there was no pay and there were no duties assigned. Both, however, began simultaneously in 1846; and in the same year he married Miss Mary Helen Churchill, the only daughter of Sylvester Churchill, Inspector General U. S. A. It is perhaps not unfitting to cite here the remark of old Mr. Solomon Brown, that "Baird was as near a perfect man as I ever met with, and I do not see how such a man could get a wife equal to himself; but that is what he did, for she was as sweet as he was," and, added Mr. Brown, "I never saw either one angry."

Baird as a teacher was indefatigable and resourceful. He had nothing resembling the luxurious laboratories of to-day, and it was necessary for him in many instances to manufacture his own apparatus. It was scarcely possible at that time to find text-books covering the necessary ground; but, in any event, it was no plan of Baird's to study books to the exclusion of out-of-door nature. Whenever it was possible, chiefly on Saturday afternoons, he took those of his classes who cared to join him on long walking trips in the neighborhood of Carlisle, botanizing, geologizing and collecting the mammals, birds, fishes and reptiles of the neighborhood. Several of the students so trained afterwards went as collectors with various exploring parties, and did good service in procuring material for the National Museum. In 1848 Baird applied for and obtained a grant from the Smithsonian