148 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



jealousy did the courts of Madrid and Lisbon spread for three centuries a midnight 

 of ignorance with regard to the arts over the fairest portions of the globe! 



And what was the state of the useful arts in those countries at the moment when 

 they at last greeted the uncertain dawn of a questionable liberty? What is their 

 degree of weakness and irresolution, even at this day, superinduced by an habitual 

 neglect of the bounties of nature and the achievements of art? How utterly at the 

 mercy of strangers, how little competent to assert the dignity of any national charac- 

 ter are most of the Spanish- American republics! It is not pretended that ignorance 

 of their resources is the only cause of this degradation, but that the former may at 

 least be considered a fair index to mark and measure the latter. 



But it may be asked, What great national interests will be benefited by an insti- 

 tution like that now proposed? The reply is easy. 



Wherever, in prosecuting his designs, man has occasion to call to his aid the ener- 

 gies of nature, there will researches in physical science find an appropriate sphere 

 of action; and wherever any national interest involves the production or use of 

 material objects, there must the energies of nature be more or less constantly put in 

 requisition. 



Among the prominent interests affected by the existence and operation of an insti- 

 tution for physical researches are those of agriculture, of the Army, the Navy, the 

 public domain, engineering and topography; architecture civil, military, and naval; 

 the mining industry of the country and its interests in the success of the inventive 

 genius of its citizens. To these must be added commerce and manufactures. 



That all these subjects are regarded as public interests is, perhaps, sufficiently 

 evinced by the fact that in the distribution of the subjects of legislation in Congress 

 each, with the exception of mining, is deemed of sufficient importance to merit the 

 attention of a separate standing committee of each House. Thus there is in each 

 House a committee on agricuture, on military affairs, on naval affairs, on the public 

 lands, on roads and canals, on public buildings, on patents and the patent office, on 

 commerce, and on manufactures. 



The foregoing statement is made in order to show that, in asking the attention of 

 the national authorities to this subject, there is no design to obtrude upon their 

 notice matters not already within the acknowledged and long conceded sphere of 

 constitutional action ; that there is no attempt to introduce a course of legislation on 

 concerns foreign to those great interests of the nation for the protection of which 

 the fundamental law has invested the legislature with ample powers. 



1. In no department of industry is the need of experimental science more evident 

 than in that of agriculture. The labor of research and observation in this depart- 

 ment belongs alike to the botanist, the zoologist, and the chemist. The first should 

 investigate the physiology and habitudes of all those vegetable productions which 

 constitute so large a portion of the products of farming operations, together with the 

 accidents, blights, and diseases to which they are liable, the insects by which their 

 growth or usefulness may be affected, and the method of securing and reducing to a 

 merchantable form the crops of each vegetable when matured. The introduction of 

 exotic plants and the treatment which may insure their success in our climate, with 

 the method of regulating and varying the succession of crops to avoid the exhaus- 

 tion of soils, would appropriately fall under the same branch of the agricultural 

 department. 



The practicability and the proper methods of cultivating the vine, the olive, the 

 mulberry, the sugar beet, the sisal and Manila hemp, the New Zealand flax, and 

 other fibrous vegetables fit to furnish textures and cordage, would also appropriately 

 fall under the botanical division of agricultural science. 



The collections in this department would exhibit samples of not only the ordinary 

 and the rare specimens of each plant, but also the diseased individuals and the vege- 

 table monsters of each class, displaying, when practicable, the cause of such disease 



