SMITH'SON, JAMES ( 1765-1829). Founder of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, known in early life as James Lewis o• Louis Marie. He was born in France, the natural S011 of Hugh Smithson, first. Duke of Northumber land, and of Mrs. Elizabeth Keate Stacie, a mem ber of the Hmngerfo•d family of Studley. Smith son (or Macic as lie was Balled) was a student at Pembroke, where he received the degree of M.A. in Slay, 1786, and he was admitted as a fellow of the Royal Society on April 26, 1787. Ilis scientific work lay in the main in the fields of chemistry and. mineralogy, and he read 28 papers before the Royal Society, while lie pub lished 18 in Thomson's Annals of Philosophy. He left in addition a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts and a collection of some 8000 or 10.000 minerals, which were de stroyed by fire in the Smithsonian Building in 1865. Smithson passed a large part. of his life on the Continent. and died in Genoa. Italy, where he was buried in the English cemetery. His remains were removed to the United States in 1904 and are interred in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution. Ilis fortune ea me mainly from a son of his mother by a former marriage, Col. 11. L. Dickinson. except £3000 from a half-sister on the paternal side, Dorotln• Percy. He bequeathed to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, his lortune, amounting to $515.169, stipulating furthermore that if the legatee should die without issue, legitimate or illegiti mate, the money should pass to the United States "to found at Washington. under the
name of the Smithsonian Institution, an estab lishment for the increase and diffusion of knowl edge among men." As Hungerford so died in 1835. the bequest reverted to the United States. (See SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION.) In the obitu ary notice of Davies Gilbert• president of the Royal Society, the name of Smithson is associ ated with those of Wollaston, Young, and Davy, and he corresponded and associated with Arago, Biot, and Klaproth. Smithson was never in America, and it is not known what induced him to give his fortune to the United States, though a clue may be found in the following sen tences which indicate his sense of wrong in the illegitimacy of his birth. He wrote: "The best blood of England flows in my veins. On ivy father's side I am a Northumberland, on my mother's I am related to kings; but this avails me not." "My name•" Smithson wrote, "shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percies are extinct and forgotten." Consult: Rhees, Smithson and His Bequest (1880) : Langley, "James Smith son," in The Smithsonian Institution, 1846 to 1896, and the History of its First Half Century, by George Brown Goode (Washington• 1897).