Ayers, the son of Jared and Dinah (Benedict) Ayres, was born in New Canaan, Conn, September 11, 1817.
He removed to Chicago shortly before the great fire of 1871, in which he suffered considerable pecuniary loss.
Besides his specialty of nervous diseases, Dr Ayers had made notable acquisitions in certain departments of natural science, especially in ichthyology, on which he had published a large number of memoirs, in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History and of the California Academy of Sciences.
He became friends with famed ornithologist and painter John James Audubon, who named a woodpecker (now called the northern flicker) after him, mentioning him by name in his Birds of America: As the first Curator of Ichthyology of the California Academy of Sciences,[2] Ayres wrote several many papers on the fish of California, despite poor facilities.
In a letter to a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution Ayers pleaded for support for the fledgling academy: Since there were no established scientific journals available, he turned to local newspapers to publish his descriptions of fish.