698 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



or memorial to this meeting, could be made than the gift to the 

 Academy of a Fund, whether large or small, to be administered like the 

 Rumford Fund, but without the conditions which sometimes restrict 

 the usefulness of that most valuable gift. 



About thirty years ago, the Proceedings of the Academy filled twenty 

 volumes, and its Memoirs ten. At that time I urged the preparation 

 of an index to the whole, as the principal objection to publication in 

 our Proceedings is that papers are buried in them, and are likely to be 

 forgotton or overlooked. The need of such an index is much greater 

 now than at that time. We shall soon have filled fifty volumes of 

 Proceedings, and fifteen of Memoirs. 



The first toast I shall propose to you is " The Foundation of the 

 Academy." This is a question of History, and the Academy has a 

 vigorous younger sister, the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is 

 still in the prime of life, since it is but a little over a hundred years 

 old. Many persons are active members of both societies, and I will 

 ask one of them, Mr. Andrew McFarland Davis, to respond to this 

 toast. 



The paper of Mr. Davis contained the following interesting 

 account of the incorporation of the Academy and of the time 

 when it came into existence : — 



The place at which the first meeting of the Academy should be held, 

 was designated as the philosophical chamber of the University of 

 Cambridge. This was in all probability the Jefferson Laboratory, 

 rather than the Emerson Hall, of that day and was undoubtedly under 

 the roof of the present Harvard Hall. Rev. Samuel Williams, who 

 had succeeded John Winthrop as Hollis Professor of Mathematics and 

 Natural Philosophy, was one of the incorporators of the Academy. 

 He had accompanied Winthrop to Newfoundland twenty years before 

 to observe the transit of Venus, and later he had given lessons in 

 Natural Philosophy to Benjamin Thompson, better known by the title 

 which he afterward acquired of Count Rumford. 



To a certain extent the definition given of the purposes of the 

 Academy betrays the limitations imposed upon investigators of those 

 days by their surroundings, their education and the primitive state of 

 knowledge on most of the subjects, to the study of which they prom- 

 ised their attention. Eighty-seven per cent of the persons named in 

 the act of incorporation were graduates of Harvard College. A glance 

 at the curriculum of that institution ought to show how far this body 

 of men, who it may be inferred from the language of the preamble to 



