12 The Smithsonian histihition 



Men of every rank are joining in the chorus. Stupidity and 

 guih have had a long reign, and it begins, indeed, to be time 

 for justice and common-sense to have their turn . . . the 

 office of king is not yet aboHshed, but they daily feel the 

 inutility, or rather great inconvenience, of continuing it, and 

 its duration will probably not be long. May other nations, 

 at the time of their reforms, be wise enough to cast off, at 

 first, the contemptible incumbrance." Smithson here shares 

 the opinion of a large and influential portion of Englishmen 

 of the time in which he wrote, but the excesses of the French 

 Revolution, which immediately followed, caused a general 

 revulsion of feeling, and it would not be fair to argue from 

 this youthful expression as to his maturer judgment. 



The date of his application to the Crown for permission to 

 take his father's name has not been ascertained, but in the 

 will of his half-sister, Dorothy Percy, he is referred to as 

 "Macie" in 1794 (eight years after his father's death). The 

 name of Smithson is first certainly known to have been used 

 by him in connection with his second communication to the 

 Royal Society, "A Chemical Analysis of Some Calamines,^ 

 by James Smithson, Esquire," read November 18, 1802. 



In this paper the author remarks that " Chemistry is yet so 

 new a science ; what we know of it bears so small a propor- 

 tion of what we are ignorant of; our knowledge in every de- 

 partment of it is so incomplete, consisting entirely of isolated 

 points, thinly scattered, like lurid specks on a vast field of 

 darkness, that no researches can be undertaken without pro- 

 ducing some facts leading to consequences which extend 

 beyond the boundaries of their immediate object." 



The Abbe Haiiy had advanced the opinion that calamines 

 were all mere oxides or "calces" of zinc. Smithson's analy- 

 sis completely overthrew this opinion, and established these 



1 Philosophical Transactions, Volume XCIII, page 12. 



