10(5 BOARD OF REGENTS. 



■wholly unnecessary to provide that the business of the institution should be conducted 

 there, since the business of a library must be conducted where it is placed. The use 

 of this language would seem to imply active transactions and not to refer to books. 

 The application of $25,000 annually (five-sixths of the whole income at the date of 

 the act) to the purchase of books, would be inconsistent with and subversive of the 

 whole tenor of all that precedes the eighth section. Section ninth is singularly com- 

 prehensive, and appears to indicate a consciousness, on the part of the framers of the 

 bill, that its provisions might be proved by experience to be incongruous. 



For this they provided the true remedy, by investing the Regents with full power 

 to use their judgment in the premises, subject only to the purpose of the will of 

 Smithson, and so much of the law as was mandatory and peremptory, "all other pro- 

 visions to the contrary notwithstanding." 



On the whole, therefore, the committee think that neither the law nor the will of 

 Smithson required the Regents to consider a great library as the paramount object of 

 the institution. 



Its purpose requires means of exciting and sustaining research, of stimulating and 

 directing original inquiries, the results of which constitute an increase of knowledge, 

 and the publication of which diffuses it. 



Scientific researches are often supposed by the uninformed to be of little or no real 

 importance, and indeed are frequently ridiculed as barren of all practical utility. But 

 nothing is more mistaken than this. The most valuable and productive of the arts 

 of life, the most important and wonder-working inventions of modern times, owe 

 their being and value to scientific investigations. By these have been discovered 

 physical truths and laws, the intelligent application of which to practical inventions 

 has given immense benefits to the world. The germs of these valuable improvements 

 and "inventions have been found and developed by scientific research, the original 

 forms of which have often seemed to the many to be as idle and useless as they were 

 curious. A proposition relating to the pendulum, which for many years remained 

 only a curious theoretical relation, ultimately furnished a unit for the standard meas- 

 ures of States and nations. The discovery that a magnetic needle could be moved by 

 a galvanic current, seemed for a long time more curious than useful, and yet it con- 

 tained the germ of all that was afterwards developed in the telegraph. It has been 

 well remarked that numerous applications and inventions always result from the dis- 

 covery of a scientific principle ; so that there are many Fultons for every Franklin. 



There is no branch of industrial art which does not owe, for the most part, its im- 

 proved processes to such investigations, although- the artisans who employ them are 

 often ignorant of their true source. Smithson, who was himself a man of science 

 and research, and a contributor to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soci- 

 ety, well knew this. The members of Congress who framed the law were not igno- 

 rant of it; and the provisions for a chemical laboratory, and collections of natural 

 history, proved that they looked to the prosecution of such inquiries under the aus- 

 pices of the Smithsonian Institution. 



Wisely, therefore, did the first Board of Regents propose, in order to increase 



KNOWLEDGE — 



First. To stimulate men of talent to make original researches, by offering suitable 

 rewards for memoirs containing new truths, and to publish these and such other 

 papers of suitable character as should be offered to the institution. 



Second. To cause particular researches to be made by competent persons. 



And in order to diffuse knowledge — 



First. " To publish occasionally a series of practical reports on the progress of the 

 different branches of knowledge." 



Second. "To publish occasionally separate treatises on subjects of general inter- 

 est." 



The results which have been produced by the institution have received the appro- 

 bation of the learned in every part of the civilized world, and fully justify the wis- 

 dom of the plan adopted by the Regents, and successfully carried into operation by 

 the Secretary. 



As a proof of this, we need only state the following facts given in the last report of 

 the Regents to Congress : 



" The institution has promoted astronomy by the aid furnished the researches 

 which led to the discovery of the true orbit of the new planet, Neptune, and the de- 

 termination of the perturbations of this planet, and the other bodies of the solar 

 system, on account of their mutual attraction. It has also aided the same branch of 



