1869.] DAWSON — SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES. 9 



accommodated with rooms for their work as well as access to 

 specimens. Its publications have given to the world a great mass 

 of matter which would otherwise have been inaccessible to students. 

 Its facilities for intercommunication and exchanges between 

 scientific men, involving an immense amount of detail, have been 

 of the utmost service, and its liberal disposal of duplicate speci- 

 mens has strengthened the hands of students and teachers far and 

 wide. 



Prof. Henry and his assistants are at present giving much at- 

 tention to the collection of American antiquities, and have accu- 

 mulated a very large and instructive assemblage of objects of 

 aboriginal art from all parts of the continent. The effort is a 

 most important one. America, with its modern stone age, must 

 eventually furnish the clue to the right interpretation of the 

 immense quantity of facts as to the stone and bone age of Europe 

 now being accumulated, and of which the chronology is at present 

 so strangely, and even absurdly, exaggerated by the majority of 

 European archaeologists. 



It is a wide leap to pass from the arrow-heads and stone axes 

 of the Aboriginal Indians to the multitudinous inventions of the 

 modern Americans, but the transition is easily made by passing 

 from the Smithsonian to the noble white marble building designa- 

 ted by the humble name of Patent Office, and inspecting its 

 thousands of teet of glass cases crammed with machines and 

 models, ingenious and stupid, useful and useless ; but all monu- 

 ments of the many inventions of scheming minds. The Patent 

 Office is a vast and well arranged museum of useful art, but its 

 cases are so numerous and so crowded with objects, that a non- 

 professional visitor is simply bewildered, and contents himself with 

 a general glance at the whole. In the lower hall there stands an 

 object suggestive in several ways. It is the marble statue of 

 Washington by Powers, sent during the late war by General But- 

 ler from Baton Rouge, in imitation, perhaps, of certain Generals 

 of ancient Rome and modern France, in their treatment of works 

 of art. It is a fine figure, somewhat idealised perhaps, but giving 

 afar better conception of the temperament and aspect of the great 

 American General than the current portraits. 



A very interesting collection, known as the Army Medical 

 Museum, has been formed in Ford's theatre, the building in 

 which Lincoln was assassinated. It is a marvel of careful mount- 

 ing and preparation, and in this respect alone is well worthy of a 



