104 SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. 



On the 11th of June I received from the accountant-general of the 

 court of chancery £725 3s. 7d. This was the sum remaining to be 

 paid to me, after previous payments to others, out of cash in hand 

 appertaining to the Smithsonian fund whilst in the custody of the 

 court, as will be seen in the concluding part of the decree. That this 

 was the exact residue coming to me will be further seen by an explana- 

 tory letter from the solicitors of the 5th of July, also inclosed (marked 

 C), and more authoritatively by a document (marked D) from the 

 books of the accountant-general of the court, sent to me by the solic- 

 itors with their letter of the 11th of July. This document, besides 

 verifying in its own forms the amount of stock and money I have 

 otherwise stated myself to have received, also verifies the statements 

 in my Nos. 26 and 28 as to the sums awarded to Madame dc la Batut, 

 the arrears to John Fitall, and the money decreed as warehouse rent 

 for the boxes containing the personal effects of Mr. Smithson, which 

 I brought over and delivered into the custody of the collector at New 

 York. It is a document founded on the decree of the court itself, and 

 shows in more detail how its judgments were fulfilled. 



I received on the 12th of July £900 at the Bank of England, being 

 the dividend due on the consols I had sold, as mentioned in my No. 29; 

 and, lastly, I received from the solicitors £116 2s. 2d., being money 

 returned by them out of what I had paid them for costs on the 8th day 

 or April, 1837, viz, £200 4s., as reported in my No. l-l. The follow- 

 ing is the explanation of this item: When I paid them this sum, I fully 

 expected to pay all further costs out of the same fund, then in my hands, 

 that Congress had appropriated for that purpose; but it appears that, 

 on the termination of the suit in favor of the United States, the costs 

 of all parties were paid out of the corpus of the fund; nor would the 

 court award the fund to the United States, as may be seen by the decree, 

 until all costs were accordingl}^ first taken out of it, which the court 

 judged it proper the fund itself should bear. I knew not of such a rule 

 which the solicitors advert to in their letter of July the 5th, until a 

 short time before the decree was pronounced. The total amount of 

 their costs, as made known to me in the same letter, and set out in 

 detail in a voluminous bill, which I inclose (marked E), and to which I 

 caused their affidavits to be annexed, was £1:90 is. lOd. The court 

 adjudged £406 3s. of this sum to be paid to them out of the fund, as 

 their taxed costs, w;hich, added to what I had previously paid them, 

 made £606 7s. The difference between this and £490 4s. lOd. being 

 £116 2s. 2d. , they refunded the latter sum to me. Their total bill 

 (considering that it included all fees paid by them under my direction 

 to the counsel, and all costs and charges of every description from the 

 beginning to the end of the suit, with some small extra charges, to 

 which their letter refers, which I also authorized, to insure a speedy 

 and successful termination of the suit), and considering the magnitude 



