The First National Scientific Congress. 471 



tiall}' national, and at the time of its greatest prosperity it had nearly 

 1,600 names upon its membership roll. 



Its most peculiar feature was the circumstance that its active sup- 

 porters were men of high official rank in the National Government, who 

 attended its meetings, occupied the chair, and delivered addresses and 

 communications. It is much to be regretted that this association of 

 public men with scientific organizations has not been continued in the 

 last half of the present century in the same way that it was in the first 

 seventy-five years of our national existence. The agency of John 

 Adams in founding The American Academy, the labors of Franklin, 

 Jefferson, Washington, Gallatin, Madison, John Quincy Adams in con- 

 nection with the American Philosophical Society are well known to all. 

 In the closing years of the last century, when the national seat of Gov- 

 ernment was in Philadelphia, the meetings of the American Philosoph- 

 ical Society were attended and largely kept up by high officials of the 

 Government. 



When Washington became the National Capital attempts were made 

 from time to time to supply the want of scientific organizations, and 

 from 1808 when a meeting of the United States Military Philosophical 

 Society — the first national scientific society with a peripatetic system of 

 meetings — was held in Washington City there appears to have been 

 always a place of assemblage for men of scientific tastes at the National 

 Capital, where cultivators of the sciences met together for conference 

 and discussion. 



Somewhere between 18 10 and 18 15 an organization known as the 

 Metropolitan Society was in existence in Washington. This in 18 16 

 became the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, 

 of which John Quinc}' Adams, Samuel L. Southard, Daniel Webster, 

 Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Edward Everett, and many other public 

 men were supporters, and whose meetings were held in a room in the 

 Capitol. The Columbian Institute, dormant after 1825, in 1840 passed 

 into the National Institution for the Promotion of Science. 



The National Institution in April, 1844, instituted in Washington the 

 first national congress of scientific men — the first cosmopolitan as.sem- 

 blage of the kind which in any respect foreshadowed the great con- 

 gresses of the American Association in later years. This gathering 

 was upon the occasion of the first annual or general meeting of the 

 institution, and to it were invited the members of the American Philo- 

 sophical Society, as the oldest scientific institution in the country; the 

 members of the American Association of Naturalists and Geologists, 

 and the members of all other scientific and learned societies in the 

 United States, and all others engaged and concerned in the increase and 

 diffusion of knowledge among men. 



It is not necessary to describe at length the proceedings upon this 



