374 congressio:n AL proceedings. 



devoted, indeed, to the cultivation of certain branches of natural 

 knowledge, but excluding no. science, no philosophy, from his sympa- 

 thies. Too enlightened to be ignorant of the commune vinculum, the 

 common bond of mutual relation, which makes all knowledges recipro- 

 cally communicative and receptive — each borrowing light from all 

 and each in turn reflecting light upon all— he was too generous to con- 

 fine his bounty to the gratification of tastes entirely similar to his 

 own. None of the objects embraced 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 gathered no library, his writings show him to have been a 

 man of somewhat multifarious reading, and it is quite a gratuitous 

 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 promot- 

 ing all knowledge for the common benefit of all men — and to appro- 

 priate 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 dis- 

 pensers of a charity which knows no limits but the utmost bounds of 

 human knowledge and claims as its recipients the men of this and of 

 all coming ages. 



The limitation of the bequest, then, is to the "increase and diffusion 

 of knowledge among men." Here two objects are aimed at — increase, 

 enlargement, extension, progress; and diffusion, spread, communica- 

 tion, dissemination. These the bill seeks to accomplish by various 

 means. It proposes to increase knowledge by collecting specimens of 

 the works of nature from every clime, and in each of her kingdoms; by 

 gathering objects in every branch of industrial, decorative, representa- 

 tive, and iuiaginativeart; by accumulating the records of human action, 

 and thought, and imagination in every form of literature; by institut- 

 ing experimental researches in agriculture, in hoi'ticulture, in chem- 

 istry, and in other studies founded upon observation. It proposes to 

 diffuse the knowledge thus accumulated, acquired, and extended by 

 throwing open to public use the diversified collections of the Institu- 

 tion in every branch of human inquiry; by lectures upon every sub- 

 ject of liberal interest; by a normal school where teachers shall become 

 pupils, and the best modes that experience has devised for imparting 

 the rudiments of knowledge shall be comnuinicated; b}" preparing and 



