On the first day of July, 1836, a bill authorizing the President to assert and prosecute the claim of the United States to the Smithson legacy became a law. This, however, was after much opposition in Congress; a member of the House indignantly declaring that our Government should receive nothing by way of gift from England, and proposing that the bequest should be denied. The prophetic words of the venerable John Quincy Adams--then a member of the House after his retirement from the Presidency--in advocating the passage of the bill are worthy of remembrance: "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 founders, none can be named more deserving the approbation of mankind than this. Should it be faithfully carried into effect with an earnestness and sagacity of application and a steady perseverance of purpose proportioned to the means furnished by the will of the founder, and to the greatness and simplicity of his design as by himself declared,--'the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,'--it is no extravagance of anticipation to declare that his name will hereafter be enrolled among the benefactors of mankind." In the execution of this law, the President immediately upon its enactment appointed Richard Rush, a distinguished lawyer of Philadelphia, to proceed to London, and take the necessary steps to obtain the legacy. To the accomplishment of this purpose a suit was soon thereafter instituted by Mr. Rush. The hopelessness of its early termination in an English Chancery Court of that day will at once occur to the readers of Dickens's famous "Jarndyce against Jarndyce." It was truly said, that a chancery suit was a thing which might begin with a man's life, and its termination be his epitaph. A wiser selection than Mr. Rush could not have been made. He entered upon the work to which he had been appointed, with great determination. In a letter to our Secretary of State just after he had instituted suit, he says: "A suit of higher interest and dignity, has rarely perhaps been before the tribunals of a nation. If the trust created by the testator's will be successfully carried into effect by the enlightened legislation of Congress, benefits may flow to the United States, and to the human family, not easy to be estimated, because operating silently and gradually throughout time, yet not operating the less effectually. Not to speak of the inappreciable value of letters to individual and social man, the monuments which they raise to a nation's glory often last when others perish, and seem especially appropriate to the glory of a Republic whose foundations are laid in the assumed intelligence of its citizens, and can only be strengthened and perpetuated as that improve."