National Scienlijic and Ediicatioiia! Iiistihidoiis. 2S7 



Although it has not since 1832 made any claims for Government aid, 

 nor assumed to be in any way a ward (jf the nation, its early history is 

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

 university, which has been for more than a centiu'v l)efore the people. 

 The Government has since established in Washington Cit}' the National 

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

 intended primaril}' for the freedman but open to all. 



The founders of the Columbian Institute and the Columbian University 

 were Iniilding better than they knew, for they were not only advancing 

 knowledge in their own da}- 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 beyond 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 Ro}-al 

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

 friend and associate of many of the leading scientific men of England, 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 we know, no 

 friend or correspondent in the United States, 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 ma}^ 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 fore.saw, grow into national 

 importance. Anyone who w'ill 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 tho.se 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 historj' of James Smithson and his Bequest, in which he calls aUention to the fact 

 that in the library of Smithson was a copy of Travels through North America, ])ub- 

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

 the city of Washington, and refers to it prophetically as likel}' .some time to betome 

 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. 



