I shall confine myself to some few points which I deem to be the most 

 important and proper for me to dwell upon. 



It being, then, my opinion, agreeing to a considerable extent with the 

 opinions of Messrs. Adams, Rush, Wayland,Duponceau, Preston, &c., 

 that the more general and the more public the oral or other instruction 

 proposed to be so delivered, commencing with the close of an academic 

 education, can be made, the better and more salutary will be the results, 

 I think the location and mode of construction for the Smithsonian In- 

 stitution matters well worth a serious discussion. It happens, fortu- 

 nately, that an extensive and well adapted space of open ground, called 

 the Mall, stretching from the base of the Capitol to the banks of the 

 Potomac, seems to invite Congress to place the institution there, and to 

 improve and ornament it in a tasty and judicious manner. There could 

 be no fitter position, one more convenient to the citizens and strangers, 

 grounds more easily put into a state of improvement, and better calcu- 

 lated to ornament this metropolis, and make it worthy of being the 

 headquarters of learning, as well as Government, for these free and grow- 

 ing States. The buildings for the accommodation of the lecturers and 

 their hearers, whilst neat and ornamental, should be erected with a due 

 regard to economy, because the fund is comparatively a small one, and 

 it is much more important to secure men of talent as professors, and to 

 devote more money to the diffusion of knowledge by their means, than 

 to raise imposing edifices or stately monuments of architecture. If re- 

 fined taste is to be exerted, which I most sincerely hope may be the case, 

 let it be exhibited in the adaptation of the structures to the uses for which 

 they may be intended, and in the preparation and arrangement of the 

 grounds. Let the fund be used sparingly and judiciously, but by no 

 means in a spirit of false economy, which is so much the fashion of the 

 day. And, my word for it, if proper professors be selected, fit instru- 

 ments and apparatus be procured, appropriate rooms be erected, and 

 political favoritism be banished, as an unclean thing, from the sacred 

 precincts of our great University if an intelligent man be appointed to 

 lay out the Mall, with an eye to the union of the English Park and 

 Continental garden styles in the arrangement of the grounds, and com- 

 petent and attentive gardeners be placed over them when finished, whose 

 duty it shall be to keep them in good order, my word for it, I say, that 

 this country will have cause to bless the day when the philanthropic 

 Smithson entrusted the execution of his wishes to a Government which 

 must not, cannot prove recreant to the trust. Every one who has stood 



