34 SMITHSONIAN BEQUEST. 



immediately, to express my wish that no such encourage- 

 ment be in future held out to him ; but it seems that he 

 had already taken his course ; their letter of the 22d instant 

 gives me to understand that he proposes to address a me- 

 morial to the President, through the auspices of .Mr. 

 Drummond, the defendant in the suit. That he would 

 have done so on his own motion, in the end, without any 

 hint from the solicitors, is probable enough ; but I was 

 sorry it had been given to him. For myself, I have invari- 

 ably discountenanced all his pretensions, deeming it my 

 duty to do so most unequivocally. I have refused to see 

 him, unless in presence of the solicitors, lest he should 

 misunderstand, or forget, or pervert, what I might say ; 

 and the latter told me they could perceive no advantage in 

 my seeing him. If the United States recover the legacy 

 bequeathed by Mr. Smithson, I should naturally regard the 

 whole of it as a trust fund in their hands, not to be in any- 

 wise diminished or touched but by the same legislative 

 power that accepted it, for the purposes specially set forth 

 in the act of Congress of the 1st of July, 1836. Not only, 

 therefore, do I disclaim all authority for yielding, in the 

 slightest degree, to Monsieur la Batut's demands,, or giving 

 him the least hope that any of them are ultimately to be 

 allowed by the United States, but I should have thought it 

 not justifiable in me to refer him to the President. 



Not being sure that I rightly understood what the solici- 

 tors mean in their letter of the 9th, about an alteration in 

 the law, I sought an explanation from them. It appears 

 that, by an act of Parliament passed in 1834, whenever a 

 person entitled to the annual proceeds of any fund or prop- 

 erty for his life, under a will coming into operation after 

 the passing of the act, dies between the points of time as- 

 signed for the periodical payments, his representatives be- 

 come entitled to a proportionate part of the accruing pro- 

 ceeds up to the day of his death. Before this act, there was 

 no such apportionment; and, as Mr. Smithson's will came 

 into operation before it was passed, Hungerford's represent- 

 atives have no claim to any of the dividend that accrued 

 after the last dividend day that happened previously to his 

 decease. I asked how this would stand with the case I 

 drew up for the opinion of counsel, as transmitted with my 

 No. 4 ; in which, among other things, I stated, under the 

 sanction of the solicitors, that " Mr. Hungerford received 

 the income arising from the testator's property up to the time 



