A'atioiial Sciciilific and JCHiicadonal Instilnliotis. 287 



Althou>;"li it has iu)t since 1832 made au}' claims for Government aid, 

 nor assumed to l:)e in any way a ward of the nation, its early historj'' is 

 significant, on account of its connection with the project for a national 

 university, which has been for more than a century before the people. 

 The Government has since established in Washington City the National 

 Deaf-Mute College, which it still maintain:,, and the Howard University, 

 intended primarily for the freedman but open to all. 



The founders of the Columbian Institute and the Columbian University 

 were building better than they knew, for they w^ere not only advancing 

 knowledge in their own day and generation, but they were educating 

 public opinion for a great opportunity, which soon came in the form of a 

 gift to the nation from be3^ond the sea in the form of the Smithson 

 bequest. 



The story of the Smithsonian Institution is a remarkable one. Smith- 

 son was a graduate of the University of Oxford, a fellow of the Royal 

 Society, a chemist and mineralogist of well-recognized position. The 

 friend and associate of many of the leading scientific men of Kngland, he 

 found it advisable, for reasons connected with his family history, to pass 

 most of his life upon the Continent. A man of ample fortune, he asso- 

 ciated with men of similar tastes, and died in 1829, leaving in trust to the 

 United States property now amounting in value to nearly three-quarters 

 of a million of dollars to establish at the national capital ' ' an institution 

 for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men. ' ' No one has 

 been able to explain why he did this. He had, so far as v/e know, no 

 friend or correspondent in the United vStates, and had made known to no 

 one his intention of establishing an institution of learning in the New 

 World.' 



It is more than probable, however, that he knew Barlow when Ameri- 

 can minister in Paris, and that the prospectus of the National Institution 

 or the treatise by Dupont de Nemours may have attracted his attention. 

 He was aware of the failure of the attempts to obtain national support at 

 the start for scientific uses, and conceived the idea of founding, with his 

 own means, an organization which should, he foresaw, grow into national 

 importance. Anyone who will take the pains to compare the criticisms 

 and objections to Barlow's project, as set forth in Wirt's essay in The 

 Old Bachelor,'' with those which were urged in Congress and the public 

 press in opposition to the acceptance of the Smithson bequest thirty years 

 later, can not fail to be greatly impressed by the similarity of tone and 

 argument. 



' The only suggestion which has ever been offered is that by Mr. W. J. Rhees, in 

 his history of James Smithson and his Bequest, in which he calls attention to the fact 

 that in the library of Smithson was a copy of Travels through North America, pub- 

 lished in 1807 by Isaac \N''eld, secretary of the Royal Society, in which he describes 

 the city of Washington, and refers to it prophetically as likely some time to become 

 the intellectual and political center of one of the greatest nations of the world. 



''The Old Bachelor, p. 171. Baltimore: F. Lucas, jr. Small 8vo, pp. 1-235. 



