SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY. 



19 



the difficult problems which were offered in his time to human ob- 

 servation or curiosity. One of his most intimate friends, Dr. Cyrus 

 Adler, to whom I am greatly indebted for details of Langley's life, 

 tells us that he loved to talk with men of positive religious views 

 about their own beliefs, and took a deep interest in a Jesuit, or a 

 Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, or, indeed, in any man who 

 thought he had secured any truth and knew the way of life in this 

 world or in the world to come. His paper on "The Laws of Nature" 

 is a very significant revelation of this characteristic — melancholy at 

 times, but suggestive of broader ranges of thought than those 

 bounded by the orbits of the greater number of skeptics. 



Nor was all this at the expense of his scientific, artistic, or prac- 

 tical qualities. 



Being with him in Paris some years since, I learned from him his 

 hope that a great collection, made with large resources, special abil- 

 ity, and long-continued care — a collection which illustrated an im- 

 portant field of industrial endeavor and at the same time some 

 interesting fields in art — was in the possession of an American then 

 residing in that city, wdio in various conversations had shown a 

 willingness to have it pass under some public custody in the United 

 States. 



Doctor Langley's discussions of this collection, of its bearings both 

 on art and industry, of the appropriateness of such a destination, of 

 the place which it might occupy in the Smithsonian Institution, showed 

 a breadth of view and a fertility of resource in practical matters 

 which left nothing to be desired. His arguments were absolutely 

 convincing, and it is through no fault of his that the arrangement 

 which he proposed has not yet been consummated, and none the less 

 does his earnestness in behalf of an exhibition which would have 

 benefited not merely Washington, but the whole country, deserve 

 commemoration. 



It may be thought that this popularizing of scientific results, this 

 zeal in fields which his predecessors had thought mainly outside of 

 the true scope of the Smithsonian Institution, this broad love for 

 literature, art, and general science, this passion for investigating 

 remote and even strange subjects of thought, this zeal for attaching 

 to the Smithsonian Institution anything of value in any field, would 

 weaken his power for fixing his mind upon his main subjects of in- 

 vestigation. Not so : not at all so. These studies outside his main 

 work certainly revived him and gave him new energy. Again and 

 again he came back to original researches and studies in his own 

 field of science which showed all his old fertility and ingenuity. 



