CHEMISTRY IN THE UNITED STATES. 
189 
Englishman, bequeathed his property to the United States 
to found in Washington “ an institution for the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men,” and in 1846 his project 
was realized. The Smithsonian Institution was established; 
and under the direction of Joseph Henry it became at once 
a center of scientific influence and activity. Smithson, it will 
be remembered, was a chemist and mineralogist, and it was 
therefore eminently proper that the institution which bore 
his name should from the very beginning maintain a chem¬ 
ical laboratory. Furthermore, in the earlier years of its 
history the institution provided several courses of popular 
lectures upon chemistry; it has subsidized some chemical in¬ 
vestigations, has published original researches, and it has 
issued a number of useful works in the way of special re¬ 
ports, volumes of physical constants, and bibliographies. 
Although its energies have been more conspicuously exerted 
in the fields of zoology, anthropology, and meteorology, it has 
done much for chemical science. The subjects which inter¬ 
ested its founder have never been neglected. In the history 
of American chemistry the Smithsonian Institution plays an 
honorable part. 
In 1847 and 1848 the Sheffield and Lawrence scientific 
schools were founded, the one at New Haven, the other under 
the protecting shelter of Harvard College. In the one, chem¬ 
istry was taught by J. P. Norton and the younger Silliman, 
while Horsford conducted the laboratory at Cambridge. The 
much older Polytechnic Institute at Troy had developed 
mainly as a school of engineering, so that the two new insti¬ 
tutions practically stood by themselves as the only higher 
schools of chemistry—schools in which professional chemists 
could receive a thorough training—within the limits of the 
United States. Their influence soon began to be felt, their 
graduates went forth to take important positions, the stimulus 
to scientific studies spread to the colleges, and the chemist 
became recognized as the representative of a new learned 
profession. Law, medicine, and divinity no longer formed a 
class by themselves; other branches of scholarship were- to 
take rank with them. 
