These words came to my mind last summer in London when I saw the present Duke of Northumberland, grandson of Smithson’s half-brother, a feeble old man, still one of England’s greatest dignitaries, following in the train of the Prince of Wales, and rising to falter out a feeble speech proposing a vote of thanks to His Royal Highness for presiding at one of the conferences of the International Fisheries’ Exhibition, upon the occasion of an address by Prof. Huxley, president of the Royal Society. The name of the Smithsonian Institution has a world-wide fame; but who outside of English court circles ever heard of Algernon George Percy, Duke of Northumberland?
Smithson seems early in life to have become imbued with the scientific spirit of his time. In 1784, while still an undergraduate at Oxford, he made a scientific exploration of the coasts of Scotland in company with a party of geologists. In 1787 he was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and during the remaining forty-two years of his life, a considerable portion of which was passed upon the continent, in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Florence and Geneva, he was the associate of the leading men of science, and devoted himself to research. He made an extensive collection of minerals, which was destroyed by the burning of a portion of the Smithsonian building in 1865, and always carried with him a portable chemical laboratory. His contributions to science are included in twenty-seven memoirs, chiefly upon topics in mineralogy and organic chemistry, but a number of them relating to applied science and the industrial arts.
His work was by no means of an epoch-making character, but seems to have been remarkable for its minute accuracy. Smithson was a much greater man than his published writings would indicate. In his eulogy the president of the Royal Society remarked: “He carried with him the esteem of various private friends, and of a still larger number of persons who admired and appreciated his acquirements.” He was evidently a man of broad, general culture, who understood thoroughly the needs of the world in the direction of scientific endowment, and whose action in bequeathing his estate to the people of America was deliberate and well considered.
In his admirable little monograph entitled “Smithson and His Bequest,” Mr. W. J. Rhees has shown the tendency of the time of Smithson to have been in the direction of establishing permanent scientific institutions. Between 1782 and 1826, over twenty of the most important academies and societies now in existence were organized. This period he remarks “was not less marked by the gloom occasioned by long protracted and almost universal war, and the extent and rapidity of its social changes, than by the luster of its brilliant discoveries in science, and its useful inventions in the arts. Pure, abstract science had many illustrious votaries, and the practical applications of its truths gave to the world many of the great inventions by means of which civilization has made such immense and rapid progress.” He quotes in support of these statements the words of Lord Brougham, the representative statesman of the day. “To instruct the people in the rudiments of philosophy,” Brougham remarked, “would of itself be an object sufficiently brilliant to allure the noblest ambition.”
He recommended this idea to the wealthy men of England, pointing out how, by the promotion of such ends, a man, however averse to the turmoil of public affairs, may enjoy the noblest gratification of which the most aspiring nature is susceptible, and may influence by his single exertions the character and fortunes of a whole generation.
Very closely do these ideas agree with those expressed by Smithson in various passages in his note books, especially with that which is used for a motto upon the publications of the Institution: “Every man is a valuable member of society who, by his observations, researches, and experiments, procures knowledge for men.” Or this: “It is in his knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness, the high superiority which he holds over the other animals who inherit the earth with him, and consequently, no ignorance is probably without loss to him, no error without evil.”
It was with a mind full of such thoughts as these, with perhaps the support and inspiration of Lord Brougham’s words quoted above from his “Treatise on Popular Education,” printed in 1825, with such models in mind as the Royal Society, whose object is “the improvement of natural knowledge,” the Royal Institution “for diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical inventions and improvements, and for teaching the application of science to the common purposes of life,” and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge established in London in 1825, that in 1826 Smithson drew up his will containing the following weighty provision: “I bequeath the whole of my property to the United States of America to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”
No one has been able to show why he selected the United States as the seat of his foundation. He had no acquaintances in America, nor does he appear to have had any books relating to America save two. Rhees quotes from one of these, “Travels Through North America,” by Isaac Weld, secretary of the Royal Society, a paragraph concerning Washington, then a small town of 5,000 inhabitants, in which it is predicted that “the Federal city, as soon as navigation is perfected, will increase most rapidly, and that at a future day, if the affairs of the United States go on as rapidly as they have done, it will become the grand emporium of the West, and rival in magnitude and splendor the cities of the whole world.”
Inspired by a belief in the future greatness of the new nation, realizing that while the needs of England were well met by existing organizations such as would not be likely to spring up for many years in a new, poor, and growing country, he founded in the new England an institution of learning, the civilizing power of which has been of incalculable value. Who can attempt to say what the condition of the United States would have been to-day without this bequest? In the words of John Quincy Adams: “Of all the foundations of establishments for pious or charitable uses which ever signalized the spirit of the age or the comprehensive beneficence of the founder, none can be named more deserving the approbation of mankind.”