584 CONGRESSIONAL PROCEEDINGS. 



history of the world; than the leaf of the forest, on which is inscribed the thought 

 of its Creator; or than the cloud, in the lightnings of which the laws and the glory 

 of God are as distinctly revealed to the faithful of the present generation as they 

 were upon Mount Sinai. 



The valuable contributions to knowledge which have already been made by the 

 Smithsonian Institution are a living proof that vast libraries are not necessary to 

 the development of new thoughts. If you will compare these memoirs with the 

 scientific productions of the same period in Europe, you may find them perchance 

 inferior in erudition, but not in profoundness and originality of thought. Do you 

 believe that Smithson, who was himself engaged in chemical investigation, could 

 have intended a library by his words "an institution for the increase and diffusion 

 of knowledge among men?" If you will examine his 9 memoirs to the Royal 

 Society, of which he was an active member, and his 18 other contributions to 

 science, you will not find one of them that required a library for its production. 

 Each was the natural growth of a deeply thinking mind. Smithson was emphat- 

 ically a maker and not a collector of books; and in the scientific circle to which he 

 belonged the ordinary use of language would have totally precluded the interpreta- 

 tion which some men of quite a different cast of mind have presumed to impose 

 upon his words. Expand his largeness of expression to its utmost extent; include 

 in it all that a generous mind like his own would desire it to embrace; but let it not 

 be cramped and twisted out of shape and so forced from its original design that it 

 shall wholly fail to accomplish the object of the munificent testator. 



Most earnestly, then, in the name of science, and especially of American science, 

 do I protest against such a gross perversion of this important trust. I assure you, 

 sir, that the great body of scientific men throughout the country warmly approve 

 Professor Henry's plan of conducting the Smithsonian Institution and regard it as a 

 faithful exponent of the almost undivided opinion of scientific and learned men as 

 to the proper execution of Smithson' s will and the law of Congress. 



Professor Agassiz, also of Harvard University, Cambridge, whose 

 fame as a naturalist is second to that of no man living, has given, in a 

 letter to the chairman of the committee, the strongest expression of 

 his favorable opinion of the working of the Institution. The com- 

 mittee has space here only for an extract from the letter referred to: 



Smithson had already made his will and left his fortune to the Royal Society of 

 London when certain scientific papers were offered to that learned body for publi- 

 cation. Notwithstanding his efforts to have them published in their Transactions, 

 they were refused; upon which he changed his will and made his bequest to the 

 United States. It would be easy to collect in London more minute information upon 

 this occurrence, and should it appear desirable, I think I could put the committee in 

 the way of learning all the circumstances. Nothing seems to me to indicate more 

 plainly what were the testator's views respecting the best means of promoting science 

 than this fact. I will not deny the great importance of libraries, and no one has felt 

 more keenly the want of an extensive scientific library than I have since I have been 

 in the United States; but, after all, libraries are only tools of a secondary value to 

 those who are really endowed by nature with the power of making original researches 

 and thus increasing knowledge among men. And though the absence or deficiency 

 of libraries is nowhere so deeply felt as in America, the application of the funds of 

 the Smithsonian Institution to the formation of a library beyond the requirements 

 of the daily progress of science would only be, in my humble opinion, a perversion 

 of the real object of the trust, inasmuch as it would tend to secure facilities only to 

 the comparatively small number "of American students who may have the time and 

 means to visit Washington when they wish to consult a library. Such an application 



