JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS. XIII 



Wheeler, preparations had been made for the publication of some of 

 the more meritorious ones. Some of them exhibited such care and pains 

 in the preparation that it was thought desirable to give some hind of 

 token of the appreciation of the Institution, and medals of silver and 

 bronze had been awarded. These medals (of which the Secretary 

 showed a photograph) were now being struck." 



Mr. Wheeler inquired if it was the papers that had received honorable 

 mention which itwas proposed to print, to which the Secretary responded 

 that that was the purpose, save where the authors preferred to print 

 themselves. 



The Secretary went on to say : 



There has probably been no single event in the history of the Institution which 

 has drawn more attention to it abroad than the announcement and award of these 

 prizes, which the Regents will remember were given in accordance with the 

 expressed desire of the donor that such might be at any rate the first disposition of 

 the income of the amount especially set apart by him for the study of the atmos- 

 phere. Having done this, I feel that a sort of pious duty has been accomplished in 

 fulfilling the wishes of Mr. Hodgkins, but while the money has been well bestowed 

 for once in drawing the almost universal attention of the scientific world to the 

 Hodgkins bequest and to the Institution and the fund which it administers, as well 

 as to its fitness as an administrator of other trusts of this character, it may be 

 doubted if it is a wise policy to continue the giving of such large prizes, which have 

 rarely been found efficacious in stimulating discovery. Unless, therefore, I am 

 instructed by the Regents to do otherwise, the income hereafter will be spent in the 

 customary channels of the Institution's activities, through the aid of investigations 

 in regard to the air which more immediately promote the general welfare. 



The large amount required for the great prize to which I have alluded, and which 

 is not likely to be called for again, has, of course, naturally limited the application 

 of this fund to the aid of original research in more practical ways, which I hope it 

 will take hereafter; but I may mention one outcome of it, a valuable investigation 

 by Dr. Weir Mitchell and Dr. Billings in "The composition of expired air." 



Continuing, the Secretary said: 



I now desire to bring before the Regents a matter in which they may see fit to 

 express some opinion. 



The fundamental act creating the Institution, in enumerating its functions, appar- 

 ent l.\ considers it first as a kind of Gallery of Art, and declares that all objects of art 

 and of foreign and curious research, the property of the United States, shall be 

 delivered to the Regents, and only after this adds that objects of natural history 

 shall be so also. 



The scientific side of the Institution's activities has been in the past so much 

 greater than its aesthetic that it is well to recall the undoubted fact that it was 

 intended by Congress to be a curator of the national art, and that this function has 

 never been forgotten, though often in abeyance. 



In 18 19, your first Secretary, Joseph Henry, in pursuance of this function of an 

 Institution which, in his own words, existed for "the true, the beautiful, as well as 

 for the immediately practical," purchased of the Hon. George P. Marsh a collection 

 of works of art — chiefly engravings — for the sum of $3,000, understood then to be 

 but a traction of its cost, and which, owing to the great rise in the market value of 

 such things in the last fifty years, does not in the least represent its value to-day. 

 It is impossible to state what the present value of the collection is, without an 

 examination of the engravings and etchings, but experts that I have consulted say 

 that the rise in all good specimens of engraving and etching during the forty-seven 



