TWENTY-NINTH CONGRESS, 1845-47. 41o 



would be so wide a departure from his large and wise pur- 

 poses, as fairly to defeat his noble aims. Had he been in 

 fact a person of so narrow views as this argument supposes, 

 he would have guarded against the possible misapplication 

 of his charity, by express words of direction or restriction ; 

 and it is a proof of rare generosity in an enthusiastic lover 

 of an engrossing pursuit, that in a bequest appropriating 

 his whole estate to the high purpose of increasing and diffu- 

 sing knowledge among men, he made no special provision 

 for the promotion of those sciences which were to him the 

 most attractive of studies. 



After all, however, he was not a student of so limited a 

 range of inquiry as has been sometimes assumed. He was 

 a man of studious and scholastic habits, and of large and 

 liberal research, specially devoted, indeed, to the cultivation 

 of certain branches of natural knowledge, but excluding no 

 science, no philosophy, from his sympathies. Too enlight- 

 ened to be ignorant of the commune vinculum, the common 

 bond of mutual relation, which makes all knowledges recip- 

 rocally communicative and receptive — each borrowing light 

 from all, and each in turn reflecting light upon all — he was 

 too generous to confine his bounty to the gratification of 

 tastes entirely similar to his own. JSTone of the objects em- 

 braced in this bill are alien from his probable views. 

 Books, indeed, he did not collect, as we propose to do, 

 because to one who had no fixed habitation a library would 

 have been but an incumbrance ; and he lived in the great 

 cities of Europe, where public and private munificence has 

 collected and devoted to general use such ample repositories 

 of the records of knowledge, that individual accumulation 

 of such stores is almost superfluous. But, though he gath- 

 ered no library, his writings show him to have been a man 

 of somewhat multifarious reading ; and it is quite a gratui- 

 tous assumption to suppose him to have been one of those 

 narrow minds, who think no path worth traveling but that 

 which they have trodden, no field worth cultivating whose 

 fruits they have never plucked. Apart, then, from the 

 liberty which the broad words of the will give us, we are 

 entitled to believe that the purposes of the testator were as 

 comprehensive as the language he has used — that he aimed 

 at promoting all knowledge for the common benefit of all 

 men — and to appropriate to the American people, in a spirit 

 worthy of the object and of ourselves, the compliment he 

 has paid us, by selecting us as the dispensers of a charity 

 which knows no limits but the utmost bounds of luiman 



