TWENTY-SIXTH CONGKESS, 1839-1841. 195 



sonian fund should be confined exclusively to this object. Far other- 

 wise; the improvement of all the arts and sciences was embraced in the 

 letter and in the spirit of Mr. Smithson's bequest; and that was one of 

 the principal reasons which induced the committee to recommend, as a 

 fundamental principal for the organization and conduct of the institu- 

 tion, that perpetuity and a regular income should be irrevocably 

 secured to the fund and yearly appropriations made only from the 

 accruing income. A botanical garden, a cabinet of natural history, a 

 museum of mineralogy, conchology, or geology, a general accumulating 

 library all institutions of which there are numerous examples among 

 the civilized Christian nations, and of most of which our own country 

 is not entirely destitute; all are undoubtedly included within the com- 

 prehensive grasp of Mr. Smithson's design; all may receive in turn, 

 and with progressive utility and power, liberal contributions from the 

 continually growing income of the trust. Nor did the committee 

 believe that the moral or political sciences, the philosophy of lan- 

 guage, the natural history of speech, the graces of polite literature, 

 the mechanic or the liberal arts, were to be excluded from the benefits 

 prepared for posterity by the perpetuation of this fund. Whatever 

 personal preference Mr. Smithson may, during his life, have enter- 

 tained for the cultivation of the natural sciences, no such preference 

 encumbers his bequest or is indicated by his will. It is knowledge, 

 the source of all human wisdom and of all beneficent power; knowl- 

 edge, as far transcending the postulated lever of Archimedes as the 

 universe transcends this speck of earth upon its face; knowledge, the 

 attribute of Omnipotence, of which man alone in the physical and 

 material world is permitted to participate; the increase and diffusion 

 of which among men is the result to which the ample fortune of Mr. 

 Smithson is devoted, and for the accomplishment of which he selects 

 the United States of America as his trustees and their National Gov- 

 ernment as his agents. Let not, then, any branch or department of 

 human knowledge be excluded from its equitable share of this bene- 

 faction. But it is believed that no one science deserves or requires 

 the immediate application of the accrued and accruing income of the 

 fund so urgently as practical astronomy. 



The express object of an observatory is the increase of knowledge 

 by new discovery. The physical relations between the firmament of 

 heaven and the globe allotted by the Creator of all to be the abode of 

 man are discoverable only by the organ of the eye. Many of these 

 relations are indispensable to the existence of human life, and perhaps 

 of the earth itself. Who can conceive the idea of a world without a 

 sun but must connect with it the extinction of light and heat, of all 

 animal life, of all vegetation and production, leaving the lifeless clod 

 of matter to return to the primitive state of chaos or to be consumed 

 by elemental fire? The influence of the moon, of the planets, our next 



