300 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Smithsonian Institution an Establishment for the increase and diffusion 

 of knowledge among men." Henceforth, for thirty-two years, until 

 his death in 1878, he devoted his life to the public service, not alone 

 of our own country, but of the entire civilized world. In this work 

 be manifested the same creative capacity that had distinguished his 

 earlier career in the domain of natural philosophy. He became an 

 organizer and a leader of men. To his wise foresight we owe not only 

 the beneficent achievements of the Smithsonian Institution itself, but 

 also, in large degree, the correspondingly beneficent achievements of 

 the Naval Observatory, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather 

 Bureau, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Fisheries and the 

 Bureau of American Ethnology; for to Henry, more than to any other 

 man, must be attributed the rise and the growth in America of the 

 present public appreciation of the scientific work carried on by gov- 

 ernmental aid. 



We may lament, with John Tyndall, that so brilliant an investi- 

 gator and discoverer as Henry should have been sacrificed to become 

 so able an administrator. And American devotees to mathematico- 

 physical science may be pardoned for entertaining an elegaic regret 

 that Henry as a pioneer in the fields of electromagnetism did not have 

 the aid of a penetratng mathematical genius, as Faraday had his 

 Maxwell. But posterity, just in its estimtes towards all the world, 

 will recognize in Henry, as we have recognized in our earlier hero, 

 Benjamin Franklin, a many-sided man — a profound student of nature; 

 a teacher whose moral and intellectual presence pointed straight to 

 the goal of truth; an inventor who dedicated his inventions immedi- 

 ately to the public good; a discoverer of the permanent law T s which 

 reign in the sphinx-like realm of physical phenomena; an adminis- 

 trator and organizer of large enterprises which have yielded a rich 

 fruitage for the enlightenment and for the melioration of mankind; 

 a leader of men devoted to the progress of science; a patriot, friend 

 and counsellor of Abraham Lincoln in the darker clays of the republic 

 — in short, an exemplar for his race, a man whose purity and nobility 

 are here fitly symbolized in enduring marble for our instruction and 

 guidance and for the instruction and the guidance of our successors in 

 the centuries to come. 



