150 FINAL ACT OF SECOND PAN AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS. 



The Congress might authorize the institution willing to take charge of 

 the union, or which might be created for that purpose, to use the means 

 and resources tending to -that end, adopting the organization which in its 

 opinion is most adequate thereto and framing regulations for its practical 

 management. 



Such a union, once established, might take into its charge the calling 

 together and organization of the present Pan American Scientific Congress, 

 arrange for its periodical meeting every five years, and put into practice, 

 as subdivisions thereof, the unions referred to in the three projects pre- 

 sented by the delegations of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, together with 

 those which it might later be considered desirable to form. 



For this purpose scientific institutions, associations, or societies exist- 

 ing or to be created in each of the American Republics should be confed- 

 erated and their activities concentrated in a central organization in the 

 capital thereof, to be further confederated with and in the Pan American 

 Intellectual Union to be located in Washington. 



The Governments of the American Republics would only be requested 

 to name official delegates to the different periodical meetings, but without 

 asking of those Governments any further intervention or participation of 

 any kind. 



In this way the new Pan American Intellectual Union would be an 

 autonomous institution, dedicated solely to science, supported by its own 

 resources, and independent of official action. 



JAMES BROWN SCOTT. 

 ALEJANDRO ALVAREZ. 

 ERNESTO QUESADA. 



The project of a Pan American Intellectual Union, as thus stated 

 by its proposers, goes forth with the approval of the Congress, which 

 specially recommended it, and of which the Congress itself said that the 

 organization taking charge of its establishment will "lay broad and 

 deep the true foundations of intellectual Pan Americanism." The pro- 

 posers of this project believed that the one great field common to all of 

 the Americas is the intellectual field, that in this domain there is neither 

 great nor small, rich nor poor, that all stand alike upon a plane of equality, 

 equality in this case being neither political nor legal but intellectual, 

 that a Union of this kind, large enough and broad enough to include in 

 its scope all branches of science, pure or applied, to be found in the 

 American Republics, would create, as it were, the republic of letters for 

 the Western World, with no boundaries but the possibilities of human 

 thought and of human achievement. The proposers of the Intellectual 

 Union thought that the visible organization or agency of the Union 

 should preferably be located in the city of Washington and they believed 

 themselves justified in the hope that private munificence would not 

 merely stimulate the thought and scientific activity of the Americas 

 where they exist but would tend to inspire the thought and to increase 



