PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OP WASHINGTON. 211 



In the year 184T, when Prof. Henry was in the forty-eighth 

 year of his age, he was unanimously elected by the Regents of the 

 iSraithsonian Institution as its Secretary, or Director. At that 

 time the institution existed only in name, under the organic act 

 passed by Congress for its incorporation, in order to give effect 

 to the bequest of James Smithson, Esquire, of London, who by 

 his last will and testament had given the whole of his property 

 to the United States, to found at Washington, under the name 

 of the "Smithsonian Institution," an establishment for "the in- 

 crease and diffusion of knowledge among men." It does not 

 need to be said that Prof Henry did not seek this appointment. 

 It came to him unsolicited, but it came to him from the Board of 

 Regents, not only by the free choice of its members, but also at 

 the suggestion and with the approval of European men of science, 

 like Sir David Brewster, Faraday, and Arago, as also of Ameri- 

 can scientific men, like Bache and Silliman and Hare. I well 

 remember to have heard the late Geo. M. Dallas (a member of 

 the constituent Board of Regents, by virtue of his office as Vice- 

 President of the United States), make the remark on q, public 

 occasion, immediately after the election of Prof. Henry as Director 

 of the Smithsonian Institution, that the Board had not had the 

 slightest hesitation in tendering the appointment to him " as being 

 peerless among the recognized heads of American science." 



At the invitation of the Regents he drew up an outline plan of 

 the Institution, and the plan was adopted by them on the 13th 

 of December, 1847. The members of this Society, living, as 

 they do, beneath the shadow of the great institution to which 

 Smithson worthily gave his name and his estate, but of which 

 Henry was at once the organizing brain and the directing hand 

 from the date of its inception down to the day of his death, do 

 not need that I should sketch for them the theory on which it 

 was projected by its first Secretary, or that I should rehearse in 

 detail the long chronicle of the useful and multiform services 

 which in pursuit of that theory it has rendered to the cause of 

 science and of human progress. And, moreover, in doing so I 

 should here again imprudently trench on the province assigned to 

 my learned colleague. But I may be allowed to portray the 

 method and spirit which he brought to the duties of this exacting 

 post, at least so far as to say that he proved himself as great in 

 administration as he was great in original research ; as skilful in 



