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JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS.   XXXIX.

"The Executive Committee beg leave respectfully to represent that in the preamble and resolution accompanying the call of the Acting Secretary for the present extraordinary meeting of the Board of Regents, they suppose themselves to have sufficiently set forth the reasons why this call has been so long delayed; the reasons which dictate the expediency of holding an extraordinary meeting at the present time, and therefore the objects which may properly engage the attention of the Board in view of the proprieties and exigencies of the situation resulting from the lamented death of the late Secretary.

Cherishing for the late Professor Baird the profound regard inspired by his talents, by his great attainments, by his life-work in the cause of science, and by his distinguished services to the Smithsonian Institution, and not doubting that this sentiment is shared by every member of the Board, your committee have thought that it was due alike to the memory of the departed Secretary whom we all held in highest honor, and to our own sense of the loss which the scientific world  in common with this Institution has sustained in his death, that we should proceed, at the earliest practicable day, to take that appropriate action in the premises which is dictated by our intimate official and personal relations with the departed Secretary, and by a sincere desire on our part to testify and record our heartfelt admiration of the great and good man whose death we deplore.

With regard to any exigencies, actual or contingent, resulting from the death of the late Secretary, it does not need not be said that first in order and first in importance stands the electing of a Secretary. Though the transactions had by the Board at the last annual meeting, in the appointment of the Assistant Secretary, who is now the Acting Secretary of the Institution, may have simplified the solution of this problem so war as we are concerned, yet there are obvious considerations of delicacy which, in the case of a sensitive and refined nature like that of the eminent man in question, must preclude him from acting with official freedom, and with a full sense of executive authority, until the mind of the Board shall have been definitely declared with regard to the succession in this most responsible office; and in the mean time he naturally shrinks from doing aught in his office which may seem to conclude the final action of the Board in the premises.

As to any possible exigencies which may have arisen in consequence of the multiplied engagements of the late Secretary, who, besides his duties as the executive officer of the Smithsonian Institution, was also charged with the direction of the U. S. National Museum, of the Bureau of Ethnology, and of the U. S. Fish Commission, we beg leave to say that certain important questions of future policy, deeply concerning the prosperity of the Institution and the cause of American science, may possibly be thrust upon the Board at this juncture in a way to call for careful consideration, if not for immediate decision.

It is known to us all that Prof. Joseph, the first Secretary and