



RELATIONS TO OTHER SCIENCES 685 



more keenly the subsequent career of this Institution, and of the or- 

 ganizations such as the Library of Congress, the U. S. Department of 

 Agriculture, the National Museum, and others created or fostered by 

 it. From the outset, however, I have remarked upon the absence from 

 the Museum of any collection relating to technical chemistry, which 

 is so profoundly connected with the history and development of 

 civilization, and which has undergone itself, in its development, so 

 many changes that its tools and appliances and methods disappear 

 completely from view unless preserved in some such historical collec- 

 tion as those made by the museums. I have endeavored, by sugges- 

 tion to have this oversight remedied, but have been met by the reply 

 that the present building is overcrowded and its resources overtaxed 

 by the mass of material collected in branches at present cultivated. As 

 now the Museum is starting on a new career of usefulness and a new 

 structure of greatly increased capacity is being built, this seems an 

 opportune time to seek publicly this recognition for industrial chem- 

 istry, at least in the anthropological collections, and particularly 

 when, as now, to a greater degree than at any other period, such 

 rapid changes are going on in long established and important indus- 

 tries, such as the sulphuric acid and the alkali industries, that the 

 processes of the last century may become among the lost arts of the 

 next century. 



Within the present year the remains of Smithson have been re- 

 moved from the soil of Italy, in which they so long rested, and been 

 reverently and fittingly interred within the confines of the noble and 

 beneficent institution that he founded. The revival of personal inter- 

 est in Smithson which this removal has aroused has led to the sug- 

 gestion that a monument be erected to his memory. The Smithsonian 

 Institution is itself an enduring monument; but if another be created 

 could it not, considering that Smithson was a chemist, fittingly take 

 the form of a chemical collection in the Museum which so long bene- 

 fited by his bequest. 



