mental skill and philosophic insight. It was during this period that 
Henry and Faraday laid the foundations for the recent wonderful 
developments of electromagnetic science. The breadth as well as 
the depth of Henry’s learning is indicated by the fact that he found 
time during this busy period for excursions and for lectures in the 
fields of architecture, astronomy, chemistry, geology, meteorology, 
and mineralogy in addition to his lectures and researches in physics. 
He was a man rich in experience and ripe in knowledge when, in 
1846, he assumed the administrative duties implied by the bequest of 
James Smithson, “To found at Washington, under the name of the 
Smithsonian Institution an Establishment for the increase and diffusion 
of knowledge among men.” henceforth, for thirty-two years, until 
his death in 1878, he devoted his life to the public service, not alone of 
our own country, but of the entire civilized world. In this work he 
manifested the same creative capacity that had distinguished his earlier 
career in the domain of natural philosophy. He became an organizer 
and a leader of men. ‘To his wise foresight we owe not only the be- 
neficent achievements of the Smithsonian Institution itself, but also, in 
large degree, the correspondingly beneficent achievements of the Naval 
Observatory, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather Bureau, 
the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Fisheries and the Bureau of Ameri- 
can Ethnology; for to Henry, more than to any other man, must be 
attributed the rise and the growth in America of the present public 
appreciation of the scientific work carried on by governmental aid. 
We may lament, with John ‘Tyndall, that so brilliant an investigator 
and discoverer as Henry should have been sacrificed to become so able 
an administrator. And American devotees to mathematico-physical 
science may be pardoned for entertaining an elegiac regret that Henry 
as a pioneer in the fields of electromagnetism did not have the aid of a 
penetrating mathematical genius, as Faraday had his Maxwell. But 
posterity, just in its estimates towards all the world, will recognize in 
Henry, as we have recognized in our earlier hero, Benjamin Franklin, 
a many-sided man —a profound student of Nature; a teacher whose 
moral and intellectual presence pointed straight to the goal of truth; 
an inventor who dedicated his inventions immediately to the public 
good; a discoverer of the permanent laws which reign in the Sphinx- 
like realm of physical phenomena; an administrator and organizer 
of large enterprises which have yielded a rich fruitage for the enlighten- 
16 
