mental skill and philosophic insight. It was during this period that 

 Henry and Faraday laid the foundations for the recent wonderful 

 developments of electromagnetic science. The breadth as well as 

 the depth of Henry's learning is indicated by the fact that he found 

 time during this busy period for excursions and for lectures in the 

 fields of architecture, astronomy, chemistry, geology, meteorology, 

 and mineralogy in addition to his lectures and researches in physics. 



He was a man rich in experience and ripe in knowledge when, in 

 184G, he assumed the administrative duties implied by the bequest of 

 James Smithson, "To found at Washington, under the name of the 

 Smithsonian Institution an Establishment for the increase and diffusion 

 of knowledge among men." Thenceforth, for thirty-two years, until 

 his death in 1878, he devoted his life to the public service, not alone of 

 our own country, but of the entire civilized world. In this work he 

 manifested the same creative capacity that had distinguished his earlier 

 career in the domain of natural philosophy. He became an organizer 

 and a leader of men. To his wise foresight we owe not only the be- 

 neficent achievements of the Smithsonian Institution itself, but also, in 

 large degree, the correspondingly beneficent achievements of the Naval 

 Observatory, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Weather Bureau, 

 the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Fisheries and the Bureau of Ameri- 

 can Ethnology; for to Henry, more than to any other man, must be 

 attributed the rise and the growth in America of the present public 

 appreciation of the scientific work carried on by governmental aid. 



We may lament, with John Tyndall, that so brilliant an investigator 

 and discoverer as Henry should have been sacrificed to become so able 

 an administrator. And American devotees to mathematico-physical 

 science may be pardoned for entertaining an elegiac regret that Henry 

 as a pioneer in the fields of electromagnetism did not have the aid of a 

 penetrating mathematical genius, as Faraday had his Maxwell. But 

 posterity, just in its estimates towards all the world, will recognize in 

 Henry, as we have recognized in our earlier hero, Benjamin Franklin, 

 a many-sided man — a profound student of Nature; a teacher whose 

 moral and intellectual presence pointed straight to the goal of truth; 

 an inventor who dedicated his inventions immediately to the public 

 good; a discoverer of the permanent laws which reign in the Sphinx- 

 like realm of physical phenomena; an administrator and organizer 

 of large enterprises which have yielded a rich fruitage for the enlighten- 



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