Life of Count Rumford. 261 



itself. We have had to bring him before us as actually 

 engaged with his own hands in constructing chimney- 

 flues, kitchens, and cooking-utensils, and have yet to 

 speak and read of him as introducing improvements in 

 common household lamps. If now any one should 

 have visited and examined the kitchens and the sitting- 

 rooms of New England during the last fifty years, or 

 read the advertisements in the newspapers and the shop- 

 cards so freely distributed, announcing wonderful im- 

 provements in stoves, furnaces, and lamps, or gas- 

 burners, and have added to these observations a walk 

 through the departments of the Patent Office at Wash- 

 ington assigned to such apparatus, he would be most 

 likely to infer that the Academy could have been at no 

 loss to find a proper recipient of the Rumford Medal 

 once in each two years. But it has proved to be 

 otherwise. The Academy promised sacredly to dis- 

 charge its trust. The homeliness or economical char- 

 acter of an invention or a discovery would never have 

 offended its dignity if a just claim had been based upon 

 it. The Academy, as we have seen, took measures to 

 circulate through the public prints the^knowledge that it 

 had an honorable award at its disposal for all who were 

 entitled to receive it. The correspondence and applica- 

 tions on its files, and the numerous reports of its in- 

 vestigating committees, prove that there has been no 

 lack of notoriety as to the facts and objects of its trus- 

 teeship, nor of a disposition to do full justice to all 

 who sought a hearing from it. But until the year 1839 

 the Academy, in the exercise of its best discretion and 

 under the guidance of its common conscience, had not 

 once made the award of the Rumford Medal. 



Meanwhile the fund had accumulated by its own 



