1846-47-] VISIT TO WASHINGTON. 285 



Dr. Samuel Morton, the great anthropologist, and an 

 excellent palaeontologist ; a remarkable man, entirely to 

 the taste of Agassiz, through the variety of his knowl- 

 edge and the originality of his discoveries and thought. 

 He also saw Conrad, Lea, Hallowell, Booth, and Frazer, 

 and was, on the whole, well impressed by Philadelphian 

 savants. 



At Washington he was surprised by the gigantic 

 scale on which the French engineer, Major Lenfant, 

 had laid out the capital of the United States, by the 

 imposing and beautiful Capitol, and also by the empti- 

 ness of many streets and quarters where building had 

 hardly begun. It was, as it was called then, the " City 

 of Magnificent Distances." Washington was not then 

 the great and beautiful city of the present day. The 

 inhabitants were few ; and the government buildings, 

 except the splendid Capitol, were limited to the White 

 House, the State Department, the War and Navy 

 buildings, and the Patent Office. The Smithsonian 

 Institution existed only on paper ; 1 and the savants 

 were few in number, while the most prominent one, 

 Professor Bache, the already celebrated director of the 

 Coast Survey, was absent on duty. Arriving fresh 

 from the great capital of France, it was a contrast to 

 find science occupying so small a place in the great 

 American republic, at least officially. Mr. Francis 

 Markoe, the chief clerk of the State Department, and 

 secretary of the National Institute, gave him a set of 

 the Transactions of that society ; and to the astonish- 



1 Professor Joseph Henry was not appointed secretary of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution until several months later, on the 3d of December, 1846. 



