Viewing page 348 of 488

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[preprinted]]
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 766
[[/preprinted]]

[[separate page inserted over page 766]]

Page 13.

G. [[underlined]]To Publish Data[[/underlined]], etc. (Continued)

never been brought together.  In 1923, the International Meteorological Conference at Utrecht started a movement to collect and select data.  Lack of funds interfered.  The Smithsonian obtained $12,000 from a private source to compile the data and publish it.  The results appeared in 1927 in a volume of "World Weather Records."  For the first time the whole world can be treated adequately in weather studies.

Research without publication is largely futile, both to the scientist and to the public.  Nothing more effectively blights research by discouraging the investigator.  The Smithsonian's international reputation was in the main earned by its classic publications which were made available to scientists over the world.  For lack of funds its main series of publications has been suspended since 1916.

5. Urgency of the Situation

For 50 years the creative work of the Smithsonian has been starved.  In 1877 a committee of the Board of Regents reported:

"That the income of the Smithsonian fund, while nominally fixed, is growing actually less year by year, with the rapidly changing value of money, and of less and less importance in the work that it accomplishes with reference to the immense extension of the country since the Government accepted the trust."

Secretary Langley in 1888 said:

"It is being forced upon us that we can not print as many books, or pay as many employees, or make as many researches as when the scheme of expenditure was first fixed..... It is ... most evidently desirable that the fund should be increased both by governmental recontribution and by private bequest.... There are several ... institutions which were at first scarcely on a par with it (the Smithsonian) financially, but whose funds, having been invested so as to share in the growth of the country, and aided by private benefactions, now surpass ours from ten to twenty-fold."

Secretary Walcott appreciated keenly the hampering effect of poverty on Smithsonian initiative.  He made many efforts to interest wealthy friends in the enlargement of its endowment.  He found the opinion generally prevailing with them, however, that the Government and not private means should meet the need.  The statement is often made, "The Smithsonian has done so much for Government, why cannot the Government do generously for the Smithsonian.

At present hardly a day passes without the necessity of rejecting some worthy (and oftentimes exceptionally worthy) activity for lack of unrestricted funds.
[[/separate page inserted over page 766]]