ADDRESS OF PROF. A. GRAY. 



67 



use to. be made of SMITHSON'S legacy. One party, headed by an 

 eminent statesman and ex-President, endeavored to found with it 

 an astronomical observatory, for which surely the country need not 

 be indebted to a foreigner. A larger party strove to secure it for a 

 library; not, probably, because they deemed that use most relevant 

 to the founder's intention, but because rival schemes might fritter 

 away the noble bequest in popular lecturing, itinerant or stationary, 

 of which the supply and the quality are in this country equal to 

 the demand ; or in the dissemination of elementary knowledge by 

 the printing-press, as if that were beyond the reach of private 

 enterprise ; or in setting up one more college, university, or other 

 educational establishment on half an endowment; or in duplica- 

 ting museums and cabinets, which, when supported by a fixed cap- 

 ital, necessarily soon reach the statical condition in which all the 

 income is absorbed in simply taking care of what has been accu- 

 mulated. 



Congress rejected, one after the other, the schemes for making of 

 the Institution an observatory, a library, a normal school, and a 

 lecturing establishment with professors at Washington. It created 

 a Board of Regents, charged it with the care of the collections and 

 museums belonging to the United States ; authorized the expendi- 

 ture, if the Regents saw fit, of a sum not exceeding twenty-five 

 thousand dollars annually for the formation of a library; and in 

 all else it directed them to make such disposal of the income "as 

 they shall deem best suited for the promotion of the purpose of the 

 testator." 



Under this charter, and with the course of the Institution still 

 to be marked out, it is not surprising that the official adviser and 

 executive of the Board should look to the will of SMITHSON for the 

 controlling interpretation of the law. He knew moreover that in 

 an earlier will, SMITHSON had bequeathed his fortune to the Royal 

 Society of London, an institution expressly for the furtherance of 



