THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC AND EDUCA- 

 TIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE. UNITED STATILS.' 



By George Brown Goode, 



Assistant Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, in cliarge of the U. S. National 



31 It sen III. 



' ' Earl}' in the seventeeiith century, ' ' we are told, ' ' the great Mr. Boyle, 

 Bishop Wilkins, and several other learned men proposed to leave Eng- 

 land and establish a society for promoting knowledge in the new colony 

 [of Connecticut] , of which Mr. Winthrop," their intimate friend and asso- 

 ciate, was appointed governor." 



"Such men," wrote the historian, "were too valuable to lose from 

 Great Britain, and Charles the Second having taken them under his pro- 

 tection in 1 66 1, the society was there estabhshed, and received the title 

 of The Royal Society of London." ^ 



For more than a hundred years this society was for our country what 

 it still is for the British colonies throughout the world — a central and 

 national scientific organization. All Americans eminent in science were 

 on its list of Fellows, among them Cotton Mather, the three Winthrops, 

 Bowdoin, and Paul Dudley, in New England; Franklin, Rittenhouse, and 

 Morgan, in Pennsylvania; Banister, Clayton, Mitchell, and Byrd, in Vir- 

 ginia; and Garden and Williamson in the Carolinas, while in its Philo- 

 sophical Transactions were publi-shed the only records of American 

 research. ■* 



• A paper presented before the American Historical Society at the meeting held in 

 Washington in 1S89, and revised and corrected by the author to July 15, 1890. 



= John Winthrop, F. R. S. [1606-1676], elected governor of Connecticut in 1657. 



3john Eliot, Biographical Dictionar}^ of Eminent Characters in New England. 

 Boston, 1809. 



•tThe first meetings of the body of men afterwards organized as the Royal Society 

 appear to have taken place during the Revolution and in the time of Cromwell; and 

 as early as 1645, we are told by Wallace, weekly meetings were held of "divers 

 worthy persons inquisitive into natural philosophy and other parts of human learn- 

 ing, and particularly of- what has been called the new philosophy, or experimental 

 philosophy," and it is more than probable that this assembly of philosophers was 

 identical with the Invisible College, of which Boyle spoke in sundry letters writ- 

 ten in 1646 and 1647. These meetings continued to be held, sometimes at the Bull- 



265 



