JOSEPH HENRY. 363 



graphical embrace, did not sacrifice the interests of the unborn to those 

 of the living. He would not allow the hopes of Smithson to be frus- 

 trated by lavishing upon a single generation what was intended for all 

 time ; or, what is worse, sacrificing both the present and the future 

 upon the altar of an ambitious architecture. Examples abound, if 

 experience is all which men need, of fatal shipwrecks on these alluring 

 shores; of endowed churches, colleges, observatories, laboratories, 

 libraries, which have nothing to show but a mass of masonry, lacking 

 in the highest beauty of art, (fitness for its purpose,) however much it 

 may please the eye, even if the merciless architect had left any thing 

 for administration. The rigid rules of science, unqualified by good 

 common sense, may work a disaster in matters of business. The con- 

 summate mathematician, La Place, omnipotent in the domain of physi- 

 cal astronomy, when appointed by Napoleon I. to a high office of state, 

 attempted to carry the laws of the infinitesimal calculus into his admin- 

 istration, and failed. Not a few men of brilliant intellect, masters of 

 thought and of the pen, have prided themselves on a childlike sim- 

 plicity in the ways of the world. If Professor Henry had been one of 

 these, much would have been forgiven to his honesty of purpose, to 

 his love of truth, and to the success with which he had wooed her in 

 her most secret recesses. Therefore, it is not the least of his triumphs 

 that he did not, in imitation of an old astronomer, walk into a pitfall 

 on this lower earth while gazing into the depths of space. He could 

 roam with Emerson through the universe of thought, but the feet of 

 both were firmly planted on the ground. Henry's judicious system of 

 expenditures, so essential to the permanent prosperity of the Institution, 

 put to shame the short-sightedness and the short-comings of many pro- 

 fessed financiers ; and exemplified, by anticipation, the magical products 

 of the Holtz and Ladd induction machines, in which a trifling capital 

 of well-invested electricity, the income of which is partly spent and 

 partly saved, yields an ample return for the present, and by the law of 

 compound interest secures still more brilliant results for the future. 



When Professor Henry left Princeton, he knew, and his friends 

 knew, that he must leave behind him the object of his highest ambi- 

 tion, viz. the undisturbed and the unostentatious study of the unfold- 

 ing laws of the material universe. But he did not, and he could not, 

 renounce the spirit of independent research which had made him what 

 he was. As opportunity offered in the discharge of his official duties 

 he manifested this spirit himself, and communicated it to others. His 

 second report to the Board of Regents, for 1848, exhibits the prompt- 

 ness with which he had conceived, and begun to execute, the project 



