In New York Harbor. on January 19, 1904, a coffin bearing the remains of a man who had never been in the United States, and is not known to have had a single American friend, was transferred from a British ship, the Princess Irene , to an American ship, the Dolphin . Draped with an American Mag, the coffin was conducted by Alexander Graham Bell and an escort from the United States War Department. The skeleton in the coflin was that of the natural son of an English nobleman—the remains of James Smithson, whose unexpected bequest of his entire estate, seventy-five years before, had provided for the establishment of the institution that now bears his name.

That institution, the famed Smithsonian, has grown to a sixe undreamed of by its founders. But although it is the largest museum complex in America and is renowned the world over for its promotion of scientific research, nobody has ever been able to explain completely why an Englishman of royal descent left his half-million-dollar fortune to the United States.

In July, 1835, the American chargé d’affaires in London, Aaron Vail, received from a British law firm a letter explaining that a Mr. James Smithson, deceased in 1829, had left stock amounting to about £100,000 in trust for his nephew, Henry J. Hungerford, who was to have the income from this amount during his lifetime. “News has just reached England,” the letter continued, “that AIr. Hnngerford has died abroad, leaving no child surviving him.” Vail was astonished to learn, upon leading the enclosed copy of Smithson’s will, that in such an eventuality the enure principal was to go to the government of the United States, “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

Vail quickly informed his government of this great windfall, and by 1836 President Andrew Jackson had appointed Richard Rush (son of the famous Dr. Benjamin Rush) to go to England and follow up the claim. The proceeds of Smithson’s bequest, which Rush had in hand by the spring of 1838. were shipped to Philadelphia on the clipper ship Mediator , carefully packed in ten boxes holding a total of 105 bags, each bag containing 1,000 gold sovereigns—except for the last, which held 960 sovereigns, eight shillings, and sixpence. At the official rate of exchange, this came to $508,318.46.

It was to be eight years, however, before the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution itself. John C. Calhoun argued that Congress ought to reject the gilt: to accept it was unconstitutional, he said, and in any case beneath the dignity of the United States. A representative from South Carolina declared that Smithson had counted on “buying everlasting fame at too low a price.” There were also a hundred different opinions as to just what sort of institution ought