516 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



the appropriations for a library and no limit to the appropriations 

 which may be made for any other of the designated objects. The lim- 

 itation in the library expenditure was rather inappropriately added to 

 one of the sections of the bill to which it was not germane. It for- 

 bids the application of more than $25,000 per annum to that purpose; 

 but the act does not anywhere require the Regents to expend annually 

 that amount. It establishes no minimum below which they shall not 

 fall in their appropriations, but it simply establishes a maximum 

 beyond which they shall not go. That has been done by Congress in 

 regard to the library, but in regard to no other object of expenditure. 

 Well, sir, the Regents, in their discretion, have not thought it neces- 

 sary or expedient to expend the whole amount of the sum to which 

 they were limited by that provision of the act, and hence, I think, all 

 the difficulties in regard to this matter. They could not understand 

 the words "not exceeding $25,000" to mean not less than $25,000, or 

 to mean nearly $25,000, or to signify anything else than that such was 

 the utmost limit of expenditure authorized by the act for this purpose. 

 The words necessarily imply that the Regents might expend less than 

 that sum, and the question how much less was one purely for their 

 discretion. 



The Regents supposed that when the act of Congress made it their 

 imperative duty to provide a suitable building, with proper and neces- 

 sary lecture rooms, Congress did not mean those lecture rooms to be 

 empty and voiceless. They supposed that the lecture rooms could only 

 be used by employing lecturers and causing lectures to be delivered. 

 They thought that a necessary and irresistible inference. They did 

 not suppose that this was any strained construction, any forced impli- 

 cation, but that it followed as necessarily as light follows the rising of 

 the sun. As the provision for lecture rooms was mandatory, there 

 was not even a discretion as to lectures. They were a matter of 

 course, and the Regents would have been justly censurable if they had 

 failed to adopt this necessary means of giving utility to the lecture 

 rooms. 



Congress further made it the imperative duty of the Regents to 

 establish a chemical laboratory. For what purpose? Whj r , I pre- 

 sume, for physical researches. If not for that, then for no purpose. 

 It was idle and nugatory in Congress to require the Regents of the 

 Smithsonian Institution to establish a chemical laboratory if they were 

 to make no researches. For the purpose of illustration of lectures a 

 little apparatus would have been all-sufficient. The Regents have felt 

 themselves bound to encourage researches, and have considered that 

 they were authorized not only to direct researches in physical science 

 but to publish them, for this Institution, we must remember, is "for 

 the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," and if we are 

 bound to have a chemical laboratory, and if we are as necessarily bound 



