PROCEEDINGS. 
549 
The organizations which are represented around this board are not 
entirely of recent growth. They are the fruit of efforts which have con¬ 
tinued for nearly a century. 
Ninety years ago, when Washington was a mere village in the midst of 
the virgin forest, it had a society where scientific and economic questions 
were discussed; where Jefferson and Barlow and Fulton and Law and 
Culbrody and Meigs and Adams met to plan for the scientific progress of 
the nation. 
Eighty years ago the old Columbian Institute was born, and this for 
nearly thirty years maintained the scientific interests of the city. 
Its successor was the National Institute, organized in 1840, which was 
for a time the most powerful scientific body on the continent, and which 
for two decades continued to hold meetings and to publish transactions. 
There followed a period of disorganization and one of recovery, and 
then, shortly after the civil war, the Philosophical Society was born.* 
Only twenty-two years have passed, and Washington has become the 
most important scientific center in the Americas; twenty-two years, and 
instead of one society we have six; only twenty-two years, and but few 
are left among a membership of nearly two hundred who w T ere connected 
with the Society in those early days. 
We have with us tonight eight of the founders of our Society. We 
shall listen with great interest to what they have to tell us of the past. 
Gentlemen, I greet you at this our four hundredth meeting. 
To the toast Our first president, J. C. Welling responded, pass¬ 
ing in review the work accomplished by Professor Henry for the 
Philosophical Society while serving as its President, 1871-1878. 
The toast Our four hundredth meeting was responded to by 
J. S. Billings, who said: 
I appreciate highly the honor to be called on to respond to this toast, 
which I take to mean the Society as it was, as it is, and as it will be. 
Many of you, no doubt, remember the meetings in the old Ford’s Theatre, 
on Tenth street. The entrance up the narrow stairs, often pervaded with 
a scientific odor from the laboratory on the lower floor—an odor once 
compared to that of the deluge at low tide—the devious and complicated 
route from the head of the stairs, past the General Committee room, to 
the place of meeting; the rather gloomy room, walled in from floor to 
ceiling with books from whose dingy backs no light was reflected, and yet 
in its general aspects and surroundings in many respects appropriate to 
the objects and purposes of the company gathered therein. A few of you 
can remember the days when Professor Henry presided, and his custom 
of taking a five minutes’ dip into one of the volumes of the large series 
* From 1861 to 1871 the only meetings of scientific men in the city were 
those of the Saturday Club and the Potomac Side Naturalists’ Club. 
72—Bull Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 12. 
