4 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
they learn as they cannot elsewhere important lessons about the nat- 
ural resources of America, the natural history of the world, and 
special aspects of the history of their own United States. Many leave 
better informed and are more truly patriotic Americans than when 
they came. As noted elsewhere in this report, volunteer, unpaid but 
well-trained docents from the Junior League of Washington instruct 
thousands of schoolchildren each year as they carefully lead them 
through specially selected halls on educational tours. 
The modernization program has had a great effect on attendance 
at the Smithsonian. The number of visitors to the Smithsonian, not 
including the National Gallery of Art or the National Zoological 
Park, in 1954, when the modernization of exhibits program began, 
was 3,658,000. The attendance of the year covered by this report, 
1959, was, as is elsewhere noted, 6,351,000. This phenomenal in- 
crease in number of visitors is certainly due in considerable measure 
to the new interest generated by the modernized exhibits. 
The staff of the Smithsonian Institution has planned and is con- 
tinuing active work on the modernization of an additional 28 exhibi- 
tion halls in our existing buildings. It is also engaged in planning 
and preparing exhibits for 47 large halls in the Smithsonian’s new 
Museum of History and Technology Building, which is being erected 
on Constitution Avenue between 12th and 14th Streets, 
This total exhibit-development program in the Smithsonian, there- 
fore, will, when it is completed, have included well over a hundred 
large galleries or major halls and literally thousands of specific ex- 
hibition units. These units will in sum total display for the public 
more than a million objects from our unrivaled national collections 
in new, clear, and intelligible settings. 
The Smithsonian Institution has long been called the Nation’s 
Treasure House. When the modernization program described in the 
preceding paragraphs is complete and when the new Museum of His- 
tory and Technology Building is opened, certainly this great national 
treasury will at long last be presented in a way that is worthy of 
modern America. 
When James Smithson specified that he wished his institution to be 
concerned not only with research but also with the diffusion of knowl- 
edge, he set a pattern that has inspired the devoted and effective work 
of the staff of his institution that has made this modernization pro- 
gram so successful. 
THE ESTABLISHMENT 
The Smithsonian Institution was created by act of Congress in 
1846, in accordance with the terms of the will of James Smithson, of 
England, who in 1826 bequeathed his property to the United States of 
America “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smith- 
