186 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



December, 1847. The members of this Society, living, as they do, 

 beneath the shadow of the great Institution to which Smithson 

 worthily gave his name and his estate, but of which Henry was at 

 once the organizing brain and the directing hand from the date of 

 its inception down to the day of his death, do not need that I should 

 sketch for them the theory on which it was projected by its first 

 Secretary, or that I should rehearse in detail the long chronicle of 

 the useful and multiform services which in pursuit of that theory it 

 has rendered to the cause of science and of human progress. And, 

 moreover, in doing so I should here again imprudently trench on the 

 province assigned to my learned colleague. But I may be allowed 

 to portray the method and spirit which he brought to the duties of 

 this exacting post, at least so far as to say that he proved himself 

 as great in administration as he was great in original research ; as 

 skilful in directing the scientific labors of others as he was skilful 

 in the conduct of his own. Seizing, as with an intuitive eye, the 

 peculiar genius of an institution which was appointed to "increase 

 knowledge" and to "diffuse" it "among men," he touched the 

 springs of scientific inquiry at a thousand points in the wide domain 

 of modern thought, and made the results of that inquiry accessible 

 to all with a catholicity as broad as the civilized world. And the 

 publications of the Smithsonian Institution, valuable as they are, 

 and replete as they are with contributions to human knowledge, 

 represent the least part of his manifold labors in connection with the 

 Institution. His correspondence was immense, covering the whole 

 field of existing knowledge, and ranging, in the persons addressed, 

 from the genuine scientific scholar in all parts of the world to the 

 last putative discoverer of perpetual motion, or the last embryo 

 mathematician who supposed himself to have squared the circle. 



In accepting a post where he was called by virtue of his office to 

 promote the labors of other men rather than his own, Professor 

 Henry distinctly saw that he was renouncing for himself the paths 

 of scientific glory on which he had entered so auspiciously at Albany 

 and Princeton. He once said to me, in one of the self-revealing 

 moods in which he sometimes unbosomed himself to his intimate 

 friends, that in accepting the office of Smithsonian Secretary he was 

 conscious that he had " sacrificed future fame to present reputation." 



