88 EIGHTH ANNUAL REPORT OF 



such language have been employed? If a library at Washington was 

 to be established, it was wholly unnecessary to provide that the busi- 

 ness of the Institution should be conducted there, since the business of 

 a library must be conducted where it is placed. The use of this lan- 

 guage would seem to imply active transactions and not to refer to 

 books. The application of $25,000 annually, (iive-sixths of the whole 

 income at the date of the act) to the purchase of books, would be in- 

 consistent with, and subversive of the whole tenor of" all that precedes 

 the eighth section. Section ninth is singularly comprehensive, and ap- 

 pears to indicate a consciousness on the part of the framers of the bill, 

 that its provisions might be proved by experience to be incongruous. 



For this tliey provided the true remedy by investing the Regents 

 with tiill power to use their judgment in the premises, subject only to 

 the purpose of the will of Smithson, and so much of the hiw as was 

 mandatory and peremptory, "all other provisions to the contrary, not- 

 withstanding." 



On the whole, therefore, the Committee think that neither the law 

 nor the will of Smithson required the Regents to consider a great 

 hbrary as the paramount object of the Institution. 



Its purpose requires means of exciting and sustaining research, of 

 stimulating and directing original enquiries, the results of which con- 

 stitute an increase of knowledge, and the publication of which 

 diffuses it. 



Scientific researches are often supposed by the uninformed to be of 

 Utile or no real importance, and indeed are frequently ridiculed as 

 barren of all practical utility. But nothing is more mistaken than this. 

 The most valuable and productive of the arts of" life, the most import- 

 ant and wonder-working inventions of modern times, owe their being 

 and value to scientific investigations. By these liave been discovered 

 physical truths and laws, the intelligent application of which to practi- 

 cal inventions has given immense benefits to the world. The germs 

 of these valuable improvements and inventions have been found and 

 developed by scientific research, the original fijrms of which have often 

 seemed to the many to be as idle and useless as they were curious. A 

 proposition relating to the pendulum, which for many years remained 

 only a curious theoretical relation, ultimately furnished a unit for the 

 standard measures of States and nations. The discovery that a mag- 

 netic needle could be moved by a galvanic current, seemed for a long 

 time more curious than useful, and yet it contained the germ of all that 

 was afterwards developed in the telegraph. It has been well remarked 

 that numerous applications and inventions always result from the dis- 

 covery of a scientific principle, so that tliere are many Fultons for 

 ^very Franklin. 



There is no branch of industrial art which does not owe for the most 

 part its improved processes to such investigations, although the artizans 

 who enjploy them are often ignorant of their true source. Smithson, 

 who was himself a man of science and research, and a contributor to 

 the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, well knew this. 

 The members of Congress who framed the law were not ignorant of it, 

 and the ])rovisions for a chemical laboratory, and collections of natural 



