328 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



which the Academy has been pleased to award to him, and I will 

 have them safely conveyed to him to-morrow, together with the assur- 

 ances of the satisfaction of the Academy in this action which you wish 

 me to comnmnicate to him. In common with yourself, Sir, and all the 

 Fellows present, 1 regret that that eminent peison is unable to attend 

 this meeting and receive the medals himself. And, personally, I re- 

 gret the absence of Dr. Wolcott Gibbs, who had promised to perform 

 this grateful service for his friend, and who would have been able to 

 make a more suitable reply to the able discourse with which you have 

 accompanied the presentation of the medals, and to have done more 

 justice to the claims of Dr. Draper to this distinction than I can pre- 

 tend to do. Dr. Gibbs having also been unavoidably prevented from 

 being present this evening, I have now the honor to read a communi- 

 cation from Dr. Draper to the Academy, in acknowledgment of this 

 testimony to his services to science. 



Mr. Quincy then read the following letter : — 



To the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 



Your favorable appreciation of my Researches on Radiations, ex- 

 pressed to-day by the award of the Rumford Medal, the highest testi- 

 monial of approbation that American science has to bestow on those 

 who have devoted themselves to the enlargement of knowledge, is to 

 me a most acceptable return for the attention I have given to that 

 subject through a period of more tlian forty years, and I deeply regret 

 that through ill-health I am unable to receive it in person. 



Sir David Brewster, to whom science is under so many obligations 

 for the discoveries he made, once said to me that the solar spectrum is 

 a world in itself, and that the study of it will never be completed. His 

 remark is perfectly just. 



But the spectrum is only a single manifestation of that infinite ether 

 wliich makes known to us the presence of the universe, and in which 

 whatever exists — if I may be permitted to say so — lives and moves 

 and has its being. 



What object, then, can be offered to us more worthy of contemplation 

 than the attributes of this intermedium between ourselves and the outer 

 world ? 



Its existence, the modes of motion through it, its transverse vibra- 

 tions, their creation of the ideas of light and colors in tlie mind, the 

 interferences of its waves, polarization, the conception of radiations and 

 their physical and chemical effects, — these have occupied the thoughts 



