PROMOTION OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 9 



cotton cloth for pantaloons or small clothes, counterpanes, stockings, 

 sheeting, shirts, etc. 



The Medical Society of the District of Columbia and the Wash- 

 ington Botanical Society were both established in 1817; and the 

 Columbian Horticultural Society for the encouragement, promotion 

 and improvement of horticulture in all its branches, and the Wash- 

 ington Monument Society, in 1833. Each of these included prominent 

 members of the Columbian Institute, and both the Medical and Monu- 

 ment societies are among the influential Washington associations of 

 today. Next and last came the Historical Society of Washington, 

 founded in 1836, which, with the Columbian Institute, became merged 

 in the National Institution in 1841. 



Georgetown College, which originated in 1789, had already at- 

 tained some prominence, and at least early in the thirties was said 

 to have possessed a small but interesting library and a cabinet of 

 minerals and other objects of natural history. George Washington 

 University, then known as Columbian College, was opened in 1822, 

 and within a few years comprised, besides the collegiate department, 

 departments of theology, medicine and law, and a preparatory 

 school. Its faculty included several members of the Columbian 

 Institute. 



The assembling of natural history specimens and of objects of 

 art had been begun by others even before the organization of the 

 Columbian Institute, and by the time of its dissolution some of the 

 collections outside of the Institute had attained much prominence 

 and value. C. Boyle, an artist from Baltimore, is said to have estab- 

 lished the first museum of natural history in Washington, in the 

 studio previously occupied by Gilbert Stuart, at least as early as 

 1810; and soon afterwards Mr. Villard, superintendent of the mili- 

 tary depot at Greenleaf's Point, was reported to have made a small 

 collection of objects of the same character. 



In the building of the Patent Office, occupied from 1812 until 

 1836, when it was burned, was gathered a collection of models, 

 sometimes called by courtesy the American Museum of Art. In 

 the more substantial building afterward erected for the same office, 

 the number of models of inventions reached an exceptionally large 

 figure, and there was also a very extensive collection of natural 

 history, of art and of articles of historical interest, a selection of 

 the former and all of the latter passing finally to the custody of 

 the Smithsonian Institution. Georgetown College, as already men- 

 tioned, had a cabinet of natural history, while the Department of 

 War was accumulating through its surveys and otherwise important 

 collections in geology, paleontology and ethnology, including the 

 remarkable series of paintings of Indians and Indian scenes, which 

 were later to become much better known. 



