212 BULLETIN OP THE 



directing the scientific labors of others as he was skilful in the 

 conduct of his own. Seizing, as with au intuitive eye, the pecu- 

 liar genius of an institution which was appointed to " increaiie 

 knowledge" and to " diffuse^^ it " among men," he touched the 

 springs of scientific inquiry at a thousand points in the wide 

 domain of modern thought, and made the results of that inquiry- 

 accessible to all, with a catholicity as broad as the civilized 

 world. And the publications of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 valuable as they are, and replete as they are with contributions 

 to human knowledge, represent the least part of his manifold 

 laboi's in connection with the Institution, His correspondence 

 was immense, covering the whole field of existing knowledge, 

 and ranging, in the persons addressed, from the genuine scientific 

 scholar in all parts of the world, to the last putative discoverer 

 of perpetual motion, or the last embryo mathematician who sup- 

 posed himself to have squared the circle. 



In accepting a post where he was called by virtue of his office 

 to fecundate the labors of other men rather than his own, Prof. 

 Henry distinctly saw that he was renouncing for himself the 

 paths of scientific glory on which he had entered so auspiciously 

 at Albany and Princeton. He once said to me, in one of the 

 self-revealing moods in which he sometimes unbosomed himself 

 to his intimate friends, that in accepting the office of Smithsonian 

 Secretary he was conscious that he had "sacrificed future fame 

 to present reputation." He was in the habit of recalling that 

 Newton had made no discoveries after he was appointed Warden 

 of the Mint in 1695,* and I believe that the remark is histori- 

 cally accurate, unless we should incline with Biot, against the 

 better opinion of Sir David Brewster, to place after that date the 

 "discoverit'8" which Newton supposed himself to have made in 

 the Scriptural chronology and in the interpretation of the Apoc- 

 alypse — discoveries which, whenever made, provoked the theolo- 

 gical scoff, as they perhaps deserved the theological criticism of 



* The effect of the Wardenship on Newton's scientific labors may be 

 seen in the warmth with which he rebuked Flamsteed for purposing to 

 puhlisli, ill 1698, the fact that Newton was then engaged on a revision of 

 the Horroxiau theory of the moon. Newton wrote: " I do not love to be 

 printed on ewary occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreign- 

 ers about mathematical things, or to be thought by our own people 

 to he trifling away my lime when I should be about the Kingh business.'^ 



