434 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



which threatened to defeat the comprehensive views of the Secretary. 

 These views, recommended by their reasonableness and indorsed by 

 individuals, academies, and societies of science and learning, had a 

 tower of strength in the high scientific reputation and the weight 

 of character of the Secretary himself. Winning and persuasive in 

 his manner, he was inflexible in his purpose. 



Experience has proved the truth of that which was the conten- 

 tion at the time ; viz : that universities, libraries, museums, lectures, 

 because they confer local benefits, will never lack endowments, 

 whereas the Christian world had waited eighteen centuries for a 

 large-minded and large-hearted benefactor, whose bequest was all 

 knowledge, existing or to be discovered, and whose recipients were 

 all nations of men. Slowly but steadily time has revealed the wis- 

 dom and foresight of the Secretary ; individuals and communities, 

 in increasing numbers, have felt the benefits of his administration ; 

 the Government of the United States has known where to look for 

 impartial advice on matters outside of its own knowledge, in times 

 of prosperity and also in its darkest days; and now all opposition 

 has died out; and, after a trial of thirty years, no one probably 

 desires any thing better for the Smithsonian Institution than that 

 the plan, so wisely conceived and so faithfully administered by the 

 first Secretary, should continue the abiding rule for his successors. 



Moreover, the plan of Professor Henry, cosmopolitan in its geo- 

 graphical embrace, did not sacrifice the interests of the unborn to 

 those of the living. He would not allow the hopes of Smithson 

 to be frustrated by lavishing upon a single generation what was 

 intended for all time ; or, what is worse, sacrificing both the present 

 and the future upon the altar of an ambitious architecture. Ex- 

 amples abound, if experience is all which men need, of fatal ship- 

 wrecks on these alluring shores; of endowed churches, colleges, 

 observatories, laboratories, libraries, which have nothing to show 

 but a mass of masonry, lacking in the highest beauty of art, (fitness 

 for its purpose,) however much it may please the eye, even if the 

 merciless architect had left any thing for administration. The rigid 

 rules of science, unqualified by good common sense, may work a 

 disaster in matters of business. The consummate mathematician, 

 La Place, omnipotent in the domain of physical astronomy, when 



