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.”