530 The Smithsonian Institution 



Among earlier papers of great historical interest must be 

 included a lecture printed in the Smithsonian Report for 

 1854 on "The Fire Alarm Telegraph," by Doctor F. W. 

 Channing, who, with Moses E. Farmer, was the pioneer in 

 this most useful application of electricity. The lecture was 

 one of a course maintained during the years i853~'54 by 

 authority of Congress, in which a wide variety of topics re- 

 ceived popular treatment at the hands of distinguished 

 specialists. That of Doctor Channing was experimentally 

 illustrated, and furnished an excellent account of the be- 

 ginnings of electrical fire-protection. 



The most notable contribution to physics during the next 

 two or three years is to be found in the translation and publi- 

 cation of a series of reports on " Recent Progress in Physics," 

 by Doctor Miiller, the famous professor of physics and tech- 

 nology in Freiburg. These reports refer almost entirely to 

 progress in electricity, and the first, printed in the Smithsonian 

 Report for 1855, has to do with what was then almost uni- 

 versally known as " Galvanism." It fills one hundred and 

 fifteen pages, and furnishes an excellent summary of the 

 knowledge of the subject, based on theory and experiment, 

 at the date of its publication. It was followed by another on 

 the subject of " Electricity " (statical) in the Report for 1856, 

 and still others in 1857 and 1858. These summaries are val- 

 uable possessions in any physical library, even to-day, and at 

 the time of their publication they must have been a boon to 

 all American students of the subject, for original sources of 

 information were not as common then as now. In 1859 ap- 

 peared another contribution to terrestrial magnetism, in a 

 series of observations made by Elisha Kent Kane, the Arctic 

 explorer, while on his second expedition in search of Sir John 

 Franklin. These were published in Volume x of the " Con- 

 tributions." Indeed, for a long time the Smithsonian Insti- 



