& 
The Smithsonian Institution, 17 
that this “large proportion” is an average of $25,000 a year. 
Would the Board have adopted the proposition with, Mr. Meach- 
am’s understanding of it, or merely in its obvious te rms ? Who 
ever heard of a legislation which devolves a discretion over the 
amount of an appropriation upon a Board of trustees, but yet 
tacitly assumes that this discretion shall not be exercised at all; 
or shall be exercised only within some narrow and undefined lim- 
its, to be gathered, not from the act itself, but from the intentions 
and motives of a few of its promoters; which again are to be 
athered from their speeches in Congress! And this on a point 
involving the construction of a will and testament, in which pa- 
role evidence is of no account. 
uch are some of the considerations which render manifest 
to us the correctness of that construction of the law which the 
pugned ) formally affirmed. It has been re-affirmed and sanction- 
ed, in the fullest terms, by the unanimous voice of the Judiciary 
Committee of the Senate (which is always chosen from amon 
the ablest jurists of that body), when referred to them by a mo- 
tion of the Hon. Mr. Clayton, made on the express ground that, 
“if the Regents are right in the interpretation they have given 
to the law, they should be sustained by the judgment of the 
Committee and the judgment of the Senate.” It has been 
adopted in the report of one part of the special committee raised 
Les the meres and it is searcely attempted to be controverted by 
t 
We wee devoted our attention principally to the question of 
the right rather than the expediency of the actual policy of the 
Smithsonian Institution ; because it is on this that the force of 
that which cannot be done, or so well done, by existing institu- 
tions; to turn to utmost account the means ‘of _— and in- 
i Seares, Vol. Xx, No. fo. 68—duly, 1855. 
