280 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
date and 1814 is uncertain. Hazelton is of the opinion that it 
was transferred to Washington in 1800 when that city became 
the seat of government. In 1814, during the war with the 
British, it appears to have been carried into Virginia for safety. 
In 1823, a copperplate facsimile was made by order of John 
Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State, from which 200 copies 
were struck off and distributed in accordance with a resolution 
of Congress. In a letter to the Senate (which received it on 
January 2, 1824) Secretary Adams remarked: 
“An exact facsimile, engraved in copperplate, has been made by direction of 
this department, of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, 
engrossed on parchment... . . Two hundred copies have been struck off from 
this plate, and are now at the office of this department, subject to the disposal of 
Congress.”” 118 
From 1824 to 1840 the Declaration on parchment seems to 
have been kept at the Department of State, but in 1841 it was 
transferred to the new building of the Patent Office. Here it 
remained until 1877 when it was returned to the Department of 
State and preserved in the War, State and Navy building, then 
just completed. It has remained there until the present time. 
At the end of a century the Government and the people awoke 
to the fact that the precious parchment had deteriorated as a 
result of the vicissitudes to which it had been subjected, and 
was apparently in danger of destruction. In 1880 Congress 
passed an Act calling on the Secretary of the Interior and the 
National Academy of Sciences to make an examination of it, 
with a view to determining what steps should be taken to prevent 
its further deterioration, or, if possible, to restore it to its original 
condition. In May of that year Carl Schurz, Secretary of the 
Interior, requested that a committee be named by the President 
of the Academy. President Wm. B. Rogers thereupon ap- 
pointed Wolcott Gibbs, J. E. Hilgard, C. F. Chandler, R. E. 
Rogers and J. Lawrence Smith. This committee submitted a 
brief report on January 18, 1881, as follows: 
“8 Annals of Congress. See Hazelton, of. cit., p. 289. 
