$46 PROPOSED APPLICATIONS OF SMITHSON'S BEQUEST. 



Letter from John Quincy Adams. 



QUINCY, October 11, 1838. 



SIR : I have reserved for a separate letter what I pro- 

 posed to say in recommending the erection and establish- 

 ment of an astronomical observatory at Washington, as one 

 and the first application of the annual income from the 

 Smithsonian bequest, because of all that I have to say I 

 deem it by far the most important, and because having for 

 many years believed that the national character of our coun- 

 try demanded of us the establishment of such an institution, 

 as a debt of honor to the cause of science and to the world 

 of civilized man. I have hailed with cheering hope this 

 opportunity of removing the greatest obstacle which has 

 hitherto disappointed the earnest wishes that I have enter- 

 tained of witnessing, before my own departure for another 

 world, now near at hand, the disappearance of a stain upon 

 our good name, in the neglect to provide the means of in- 

 creasing and diffusing knowledge among men, by a sys- 

 tematic and continued scientific series of observations on 

 the phenomena of the numberless worlds suspended over our 

 heads the sublimest of the physical sciences, and that in 

 which the field of future discovery is as unbounded as the 

 universe itself. I allude to the continued and necessary 

 expense of such an establishment. 



In my former letter I proposed that to preserve entire 

 and unimpaired the Smithsonian fund, as the principal of a 

 perpetual annuity, the annual appropriations from its pro- 

 ceeds should be strictly confined to its annual income. 

 That, assuming the amount of the fund to be five hundred 

 thousand dollars, it should be so invested as to secure a per- 

 manent yearly income of thirty thousand ; and that it should 

 he committed to an incorporated board of trustees, with a 

 secretary and treasurer, the only person of the board to re- 

 ceive a pecuniary compensation from the fund. 



On the 18th of March, 1826, Mr. C. F. Mercer, chairman 

 of a select committee of the House of Representatives of 

 the United States, reported to that House a bill for the erec- 

 tion of a national observatory at the city of Washington, 

 together with sundry documents containing estimates of the 

 cost of erecting the buildings necessary for such an estab- 

 lishment, for the instruments and books which it would re- 

 quire, and for the compensation of a principal astronomer, 

 two assistants, and two attendants. These estimates of ex- 

 pense were, however, prepared upon the principal of pro- 

 viding the establishment at the smallest possible expense 



