21 



THE SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. 



LETTER No. V. 



WASHINGTON, January 6, 1844. 



MESSRS. EDITORS : Having referred in my last number to several 

 plans, proposed in consequence of the request of the President, convey- 

 ed through the then Secretary of State, the late Mr. Forsyth, in relation 

 to the mode in which the Smithson Fund should be employed " for 

 the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," before I proceed 

 to the quotation of different portions of the Report of the Hon. John 

 Quincy Adams, from the Select Committee to whom the subject was 

 referred in 1842, it will not be amiss to give a brief account of the gen- 

 erous testator to whose liberality we owe such a legacy, and whose 

 memory, therefore, should be endeared to every citizen of this Republic. 



The Hon. Richard Rush, in his letter of May 12th, 1838, from which 

 I have made extracts in my last, informs the Secretary of State that 

 James Smithson was the natural son of the Duke of Northumberland; 

 that his mother was a Mrs. Macie, of an ancient family of Wiltshire, of 

 the name of Hungerford ; that he was educated at Oxford, where he 

 took an honorary degree in 1 786 ; that he took the name of James 

 Lewis Macie, until a few years after he had left the University, when 

 he changed it for Smithson ; and that he does not appear to have had 

 any fixed home, living in lodgings when in London, and occasionally 

 a year or two at a time in the cities on the Continent, as Paris, Berlin, 

 Florence, and Genoa, at which last place he died ; and that the ample 

 provision made for him by the Duke of Northumberland, with retired 

 and simple habits, enabled him to accumulate the fortune which passed 

 to the United States. 



Mr. Adams, from the Select Committee above mentioned, speaks as 

 follows : " The testator, James Smithson, a subject of Great Britain, 

 ' declares himself, in the caption to the will, a descendant in blood from 

 ' the Percies and Seymours, two of the most illustrious historical names 

 * of the British Islands. Nearly two centuries since, in 1660, the an- 

 ' cestor of his own name, Hugh Smithson, immediately after the resto- 

 1 radon of the royal family of the Stuarts, received from Charles the 

 ' Second, as a reward for his eminent services to that house during the 

 ' civil wars, the dignity of Baronet of England a dignity still held by 

 ' the Dukes of Northumberland as descendants from the same Hugh 

 i Smithson. The father of the testator, by his marriage with the Lady 



