280 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



date and 1814 is uncertain. Hazelton is of the opinion that it 

 was transferred to Washington in 1800 when that city became 

 the seat of government. In 1814, during the war with the 

 British, it appears to have been carried into Virginia for safety. 

 In 1823, a copperplate facsimile was made by order of John 

 Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State, from which 200 copies 

 were struck off and distributed in accordance with a resolution 

 of Congress. In a letter to the Senate (which received it on 

 January 2, 1824) Secretary Adams remarked: 



" An exact facsimile, engraved in copperplate, has been made by direction of 

 this department, of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence, 



engrossed on parchment Two hundred copies have been struck off from 



this plate, and are now at the office of this department, subject to the disposal of 

 Congress." 118 



From 1824 to 1840 the Declaration on parchment seems to 

 have been kept at the Department of State, but in 1841 it was 

 transferred to the new building of the Patent Office. Here it 

 remained until 1877 when it was returned to the Department of 

 State and preserved in the War, State and Navy building, then 

 just completed. It has remained there until the present time. 



At the end of a century the Government and the people awoke 

 to the fact that the precious parchment had deteriorated as a 

 result of the vicissitudes to which it had been subjected, and 

 was apparently in danger of destruction. In 1880 Congress 

 passed an Act calling on the Secretary of the Interior and the 

 National Academy of Sciences to make an examination of it, 

 with a view to determining what steps should be taken to prevent 

 its further deterioration, or, if possible, to restore it to its original 

 condition. In May of that year Carl Schurz, Secretary of the 

 Interior, requested that a committee be named by the President 

 of the Academy. President Wm. B. Rogers thereupon ap- 

 pointed Wolcott Gibbs, J. E. Hilgard, C. F. Chandler, R. E. 

 Rogers and J. Lawrence Smith. This committee submitted a 

 brief report on January 18, 1881, as follows: 



118 Annals of Congress. See Hazelton, op. cit., p. 289. 



