7 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 
setts whereby justices of the supreme judicial court of the Commonwealth 
are rendered incapable of holding any place or office from any other 
State, Government, or power whatever. I regret to add that Judge 
Devens died on the 7th of January, 1891. 
The vacancy in the Board has not yet been filled. 
The Hon. George Bancroft and Gen. William T. Sherman have died 
during the year. The lives of these two eminent men have made their 
loss a national one, so widely known, and accompanied by obituary no- 
tices so general and so complete, that to repeat them here would be a 
work of superfluity. Reference is made to them elsewhere in the nec- 
rologic notices only so far as relates to their connection with the Board 
of Regents. 
Mr. Justice Miller, whose death occurred on the 16th of November, 
1890, is also to be mentioned here, having been, as acting Chief Justice, 
elected temporarily Chancellor of the Board. He served in this capac- 
ity from March 27, 1888, to January 9, 1889. It would be superfluous, 
as in the former cases, to do more than to note the fact and with it to re- 
call the sincerity of the respect and the warmth of the regard which all 
felt for him who knew him in this or in any other capacity of his eminent 
official life. 
ADMINISTRATION, 
T wish again to remark that the great extension of the interests con- 
fided to the Institution make the duties of the Secretary and his assist- 
ants altogether different from what they were in its early history. The 
change brought about by constant growth of its activities has been so 
uniform in its progression that there has been no particular moment at 
which it seemed possible to say that the burden of the work had grown 
to transcend wholly the means for effecting it. At present I feel confi- 
dent that I am justified in saying that such is the case, and that some 
provision must now be made for enabling the Secretary and his imme- 
diate assistants to have additional aid in this administration of the 
affairs of the General Government from some source not provided for 
out of the already insufficient funds of the parent institution. 
This institution administers large Government interests, while no ap- 
propriation has been made by Congress for the expense of such admin- 
istration, such as is made in all other analogous cases, and this expense 
is directly represented by an increment of the expenditure of the parent 
institution, chiefly under the head of salaries, which are not needed for 
the purposes of the original fund alone. 
FINANCES. 
I have in a previous report referred to the fact that owing to the 
changing value of money, the purchasing power of the Smithsonian 
fund, in the language of a committee of the Regents— 
“while nominally fixed, is growing actually less year by year, and of 
less and less importance in the work it accomplishes with reference to 
