THIRTY-THIRD CONGRESS, 1853-55. 541 



proper and necessary lecture rooms, Congress did not mean 

 those lecture rooms to be empty and voiceless. They sup- 

 posed that the lecture rooms could only be used by employ- 

 ing 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 implication ; 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 discre- 

 tion 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 re- 

 gents to establish a chemical laboratory. For what purpose ? 

 Why, I presume 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 the} 7 were to make no re- 

 searches. 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 re- 

 searches in physical science, but to publish them ; for this 

 institution, we must remember, is "for the increase and dif- 

 fusion of knowledge among men;" and if we are bound to 

 have a chemical laboratory, and if we are as necessarily 

 bound to cause researches to be made, I would ask, of what 

 use are the researches? How shall we increase and diffuse 

 knowledge of them among men if we seal them up, and do 

 not publish them to the world? As the collections of nat- 

 ural history would be nothing more than a show, if we were 

 satisfied with merely placing and arranging them in a mu- 

 seum, we think that they should be described. They can 

 best be made available for the increase and diffusion of' 

 knowledge by causing them to be described by scientific 

 men in memoirs, such as are published by the institution. 

 We have thought, then, that publication was as necessary 

 a result, from the express powers of the grant, as any other 

 duty which the regents had to perform. 



We did not think that the sole limit of our power. We 

 did suppose that, under the large discretion given in the 

 ninth section of the act, it was the regents who were to con- 

 sider how much of the funds of the institution were prop- 

 erly to be applied to the objects specified by the act. Since 

 Congress itself has not told us how to apportion the funds 



