National Sciciitifjc and Educatio)ial Institutions. 271 



])nictical)le in a commercial and intellectual metropolis, and the academv 

 died almost -before it was born. 



"Ouesnay's scheme was not altogether chimerical," writes H. B. 

 Adams, "but in the j^ear 1788 France was in no position, financial or 

 social, to push her educational system in ^^irginia. Tlic year Quesnay's 

 sng-f;esti\-e little tract was published was the year ])efore the French 

 Revolution, in which political maelstrom everything in France went 

 down. . . . If circum.stances had favored it, the Academy of the United 

 vStates of America, established at Richmond, would have become the cen- 

 ter of higher education not only for Virginia, but for the whole South, 

 and possibly for a large part of the North, if the academy had been 

 extended, as proposed, to the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New 

 York. vSupported by French capital, to which in large measure we owe 

 the success of our Revolutionar}' war, strengthened l)y French prestige, 

 l)y liberal scientific and artistic associations with Paris, then the intel- 

 lectual capital of the world, the academy at Richmond might have 

 become an educational stronghold, comparable in some degree to the 

 Jesuit influence in Canada, which has proved more lasting than French 

 dominion, more inipregnal)le than the fortress of Quebec." ' 



A scientific society was organized at Williamsburg during the Revolu- 

 tion, but in those trying times it failed for lack of attention on the part 

 of its founders. 



' Copies of Quesnay's pamphlet are preserved in the Virjj^inia State library at 

 Richmond and in the Andrew 13. White Historical library of Cornell University, 

 as well as in a certain private library in Baltimore. A full account of this enterpri.se 

 ma}' be found in Herl)ert B. Adams's Thomas Jefferson and the University of Vir- 

 ginia, pp. 21-30, and other records occur in Mordecai's Richmond in By-gone Days 

 (2d edition, pp. 198- 20S) and in Goode's Virginia Cousins, p. 57. 



The building erected for the Academy of Sciences was the meeting place of the 

 convention of patriots and statesmen who ratified in 1788 the Constitution of the 

 United States, and su1)sequently was the principal theater of the city of Richmond. 



The academy grounds, [writes R. A. Brock,] included the square lx)unded by 

 Broad and Marshall and Ivleventh and Twelfth streets, on the lower portion of which 

 stood the Monumental Church and the medical college. The academy .stood mid- 

 way in the square frontin,<r Broad .street. L'Academie des Ktats-Unis de I'Amerique 

 was an attempt, growing out of the French alliance with the United States, to plant 

 in Richmond a kind of French academy of the arts and .sciences, with branch acad- 

 emies in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The institution was to be at once 

 national and international. It was to be affiliated with the royal societies of I^on- 

 rlon, Paris, Brussels, and other learned bodies in Europe. It was to ])e compo.sed of 

 a president, vice-president, six counsellors, a treasurer-general, a .secretarj-, and a 

 recorder, an agent for taking Kuropean subscriptions, French profes.sors, masters, 

 artists in chief attached to the academy, 25 resident and 175 nonresident associates, 

 .selected from the best talent of the Old World and the New. The academy propo.sed 

 to publish yearly, from its own press in Paris, an almanac. The academy was to 

 show its zeal for science by comnmnicating to PVance and other European countries 

 a knowledge of the natural products of North America. The mu.seums and cabinets 

 of the Old World were to be enriched by the specimens of the flora and fauna of a 



