These remarks are succeeded by others on the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, on the connection of astronomy with the art of navigation, on the increase of observatories in the British Islands, in France, and in Russia; and, after repeating the objections to applying the fund of Mr. Smithson to a school devoted to any particular branch of science, or for general education, Mr. Adams, in behalf of the committee, submitted a bill for the consideration of the house, embracing the principles maintained in his report. On May 8th, 1840, a bill to insure a more faithful execution of the laws relating to the collection of duties on imports being under consideration of the house, Mr. Adams, after commenting on the nature and injurious consequences of the fraud which it was the object of the bill to prevent, said that this practice was "a sort of national thing," to such an extent were the citizens of Great Britain accustomed to come over to this country to cheat us out of our revenue, and to defraud our manufacturing interest, and added: "I have said that there is something national in this matter, and I will now proceed to state what, in my judgment, lies at the bottom of this proceeding. It is a maxim of British commercial law that it is lawful for the citizens of one nation to defraud the revenues of other nations. The author of the maxim was a man famous throughout the civilized world,--a man of transcendent talents, who fixed, more, perhaps, than any other man of the same century, his impress on the age in which he lived, and upon the laws of England,--I mean Lord Mansfield. In some respects it has been greatly to the advantage of those laws, but in others as much to their disadvantage and discredit, of which the maxim of which I now speak is a signal instance. He was the first British judge who established the principle that it is a lawful thing for Englishmen to cheat the revenue laws of other nations, especially those of Spain and Portugal. "This principle was first settled in an act of Parliament, the object of which was to suppress what are denominated wager policies of insurance--a species of instrument well known to lawyers as gambling policies, being entered into when the party insuring has no interest in the property insured. It had been a question whether such policies were lawful by the common law. The practice had greatly increased, insomuch that wager policies had become a common thing. It was with a view to suppress these that the statute of the nineteenth of George the Second, chapter thirty-seventh, was passed. The object of that statute was good; it was remedial in its character; it went to suppress a public evil; but, while it prohibited wager policies in all other cases, it contained _an express exception in favor of those made on vessels trading to Spain and Portugal_."