2 The Smithsonian Institution 



heiress of the Hungerfords of Studley, and niece of Charles, 

 the proud Duke of Somerset." 



We need not, then, practise a reticence which Smithson 

 himself did not desire to observe, especially since the facts 

 are already public. There is, indeed, the further reason that 

 it is especially to these facts that the foundation which bears 

 his name is due, for Smithson always seems to have regarded 

 the circumstances of his birth as doing him a peculiar injus- 

 tice, and it was apparently this sense that he had been de- 

 prived of honors properly his which made him look for other 

 sources of fame than those which birth had denied him, and 

 constituted the motive of the most important action of his life, 

 the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. 



By the student of human nature every man's conduct is 

 judged in reference to its determining motives, and if we try 

 Smithson's from the point of view of his own time, not of ours, 

 we shall not judge too hardly the fact that the circumstances 

 of his birth and his feeling that he was by right a Northum- 

 berland and a Percy were a subject of pride to him as well as 

 of pain. He once wrote : l 



" The best blood of England flows in my veins ; on my 

 father's side I am a Northumberland, on my mother's I am 

 related to Kings, 2 but this avails me not. My name shall live 

 in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberland* 

 and the Percys are extinct and forgotten" 



It has been wondered that Smithson should have left his 

 fortune for the purpose he did, but not by those who have 

 considered the sentence placed here in italics, where we surely 



1 Rhees's "Smithson and his Bequests." the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, great-grand- 

 " Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections," daughter of King Henry VII, grandnicce of 

 volume XXI. Henry VIII, and cousin of Elizabeth. His 



2 Doctor Goode pointed out in his "Account ancestor in the ninth generation, Edward Sey- 

 of the Smithsonian Institution," written for the mour, the first Duke of Somerset and Protec- 

 Atlanta Exposition, that : " Smithson was of tor of England, was the brother of Queen Jane 

 royal descent, through his maternal ancestor, Seymour and the uncle of King Edward VI." 



