REPORT OF THE SECRETARY- 



To the Board of Regents : 



Gentlemen : The principal object of the annual report of the Sec- 

 retary is to present to the Board of Regents, at the beginning of their 

 session, such an account of the events and operations of the previous 

 year as may serve as the basis of their deliberation, as well as 

 furnish the materials for a connected history of the Institution. Be- 

 sides this, however, it is desirable that each report should contain 

 such brief expositions as may tend to keep the ever-changing public 

 informed as to the true character of the establishment and of the re- 

 sults it is intended to produce. The importance of these repetitions 

 will be evident when it is recollected that these reports follow each 

 other after a considerable interval of time, are in great part distribu- 

 ted to different persons, and that now, after an interval of little less 

 than twenty years since the first one was published, but few indi- 

 viduals can obtain access to an entire set. Indeed, it is often a mat- 

 ter of surprise to meet so many intelligent persons, even in the city 

 of Washington, who are entirely ignorant of the terms of the bequest 

 on which the Institution is founded, and of the plan which has been 

 adopted to execute the trust thereby devolved upon the government. 

 It can, therefore, scarcely be too often repeated that the Institution 

 is not, as our foreign correspondents often suppose, an association of 

 learned men similar to the scientific societies of Europe and America; 

 that it is not a university for the education of youth, nor an agency 

 for the diffusion of useful knowledge among the people of the United 

 States, but primarily a foundation for enlarging the boundaries of 

 science by stimulating and assisting the researches of original inquir- 

 ers, wherever found, and for gratuitously diffusing the results of such 

 researches wherever they may conduce to the intellectual or material 

 interests of men. 



The general plan adopted for the realization of these benevolent 

 purposes, and steadily pursued from the beginning, has been repeat- 

 edly explained in the successive reports, and might, indeed, be gath- 

 ered from almost any one of them by an attentive consideration of 

 the account given of the operations of each year. In the last report 

 a brief sketch was presented of all that had been accomplished in the 



