The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  42 See Pembroke College Buttery Books for evidence of when a student was in residence. Smithson received his M.A. during convocation at the end of May. Encaenia, the official graduation ceremony, was held the following month on June 28, 1786; University Archives, Bodleian Library, Oxford. It appears from the battel books at Pembroke that Smithson returned to Oxford for Encaenia as well.

  43 In another example from the same letter, indicative of how Smithson spoke to Giddy, he wrote with news of the French Revolution, explaining, "You have understood, I hope, that the church is now here quite unacknowledged by the state, and is indeed allowed to exist only till they have leisure to give it the final death-stroke." Smithson to Giddy, 9 May, 1792; Collection of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Davies Giddy Diary entry for May 26, 1786 (probably written in c. 1826), CRO. For weather conditions I am grateful to archivist Kate Strachan for compiling information from Private Weather Diaries at the Met Office.

  44 Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London, 1998), pp. 103–4. Davies Giddy diary, March 6, 1788; DG14/1787–1790, CRO. Smithson's portrait has been attributed to James Roberts, who also painted Master Adams in 1784 and executed a sketch of Johnson for Adams' daughters Sarah at that time, by Jacob Simon of the National Portrait Gallery, London. See correspondence with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, November 14, 1997.

  45 Barbara English and John Saville, Strict Settlement: A Guide for Historians (Hull, 1983), p. 33.

  46 His mother, perhaps in an effort to compensate for this, assigned the mortgage (worth £2,000) on the Friar's Estate (9 Friar's Walk) in Lewes, which she had bought from Apsley Pellatt ten years earlier, to Smithson on April 10 and 11, 1786. This property remained a steady source of income for Smithson for many years, until the property was sold by the Pellatts to George Verrall of Lewes in 1804, when Smithson was in Hanau. At that time Smithson transferred legal rights to his solicitor Thomas Graham, who received the £2,000 on his behalf. Deeds of 9 Friar's Walk; East Sussex Record Office, Add MS, Catalogue X, Ref. AMSX.

  47 Gentlemen's Magazine 56 (1786), no. 1, pp. 529–30.

  48 Cavendish took Smithson as his guest to the Royal Society Club dinner on March 9 and December 14, 1786; Minute book of the Royal Society Club, RS Archives. He was Kirwan's guest at the meetings of the Royal Society on December 7 and 21, 1786, and January 11, 1787; List of Visitors, November 1783-June 1788; RS MS vol. 392. Smithson's election certificate in RS Archives, EC/1787/03.

  49 Smithson was not by any means the youngest member ever elected, though that claim has often been made. One only has to look as far as Smithson's father, the Duke of Northumberland, to find one who was elected at a younger age; Hugh Smithson was about twenty-one when he was elected in 1736. Christopher Wren was only eighteen when he became a member in 1693, and Charles Somerset, fourth Marquis of Worcester, was a mere thirteen years old when he was elected in 1673. From a survey of members current in 1787, it seems that Smithson was the youngest of them. But it was not a claim that Smithson held onto for very long, apparently. In early 1788 Erasmus Darwin's son Robert, the future father of Charles Darwin, became a member at age twenty-two, knocking Smithson off his "youngest member" pedestal after only a year. I am grateful to Clara Anderson at the Royal Society for her work on this problem. Personal communication with the author, summer 2004.

  50 Gadolin arrived in London with recommendation letters from the German chemist Lorenz von Crell and was embraced by Kirwan, Blagden, Adair Crawford, and others—all people who formed part of what might be called Smithson's circle at the Royal Society. Blagden to Crell, March 20, 1787; Blagden Letterbook, MS Osborn fc 15, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See also List of Visitors, Journal Book Copy (JBC) 32, RS Archives; and Blagden to Watt, June 7, 1787; Blagden Papers 7.62, RS. Thanks to Marjut Hjelt for checking the Gadolin Papers at the Helsinki University Library for evidence of Smithson, and especially to Dr. Peter B. Dean for his investigation of the Gadolinian Library, University of Abo.

  51 Sniadecki was carrying letters of introduction from the botanist and physician Jan Ingen-Housz, a favorite of the court at Vienna. He was a frequent presence at the Royal Society meetings—the guest of Smithson, Blagden, and others. Michala Balinskiego, Jan Sniadecki: Dziela Jana Sniadeckiego (Warsaw, 1839). No correspondence between Sniadecki and Smithson has been found among his papers; personal communication with Ewa Bakowska, Biblioteka Jagiellonska, 2002. See List of Visitors, JBC 32 and 33, RS Archives.

  52 Crell to Sir Joseph Banks, November 1790. BL Add MS 8097, f. 302. For background on Crell and the German chemical community, see Karl Hufbauer, The Formation of the German Chemical Community, 1720–1795 (Berkeley and London, c. 1982).

  53 In his paper Cavendish wrote that he "desired some of the Gentlemen most conversant with these subjects to be present at putting the materials together, and at the examination of the produce." Henry Cavendish, "On the Conversion of a Mixture of dephlogisticated and phlogisticated air into nitrous acid, by the electric spark," Philosophical Transactions 78 (1788), pp. 261–76. For a description of the experiment see Jungnickel and McCormmach, Cavendish: The Experimental Life, pp. 366–8. In 1790 Cavendish invited Smithson to breakfast and spend the day with him south of the river at Clapham, where he had fitted up his large Georgian house on the Common with an extensive laboratory. Sir Charles Blagden and Adair Crawford, a physician at St. Thomas' Hospital and a chemistry professor at Woolwich Arsenal, were the other participants. Lack of surviving archives means this is the only documented instance of Smithson's attendance at Cavendish's laboratory; but it may have been a relatively common event—one that has led to the story (unproven) that Smithson was a laboratory assistant to Cavendish. Blagden Letters, 7: 702, Royal Society Archives; published in Jungnickel and McCormmach, p. 679. The theory about Smithson being Cavendish's laboratory assistant was put forward in J. C. Long's notoriously error-ridden chapters on Smithson in Leonard Carmichael and J. C. Long, James Smithson and the Smithsonian Story (New York, 1965); it was repeated, with caution, in Jungnickel and McCormmach.

  54 Smithson owned a copy of the Monthly Review of May 1783 (which he inscribed "Mr. Macie/Pembroke"), which featured a front-page review of Kirwan's 1782 Philosophical Transactions paper entitled "Continuation and Observations on the specific gravities, and attractive powers, of various saline substances." Smithson Library, SIL.

  55 Cavendish to Blagden, draft letter, September 16, 1787; quoted in Golinski, Science as Public Culture, p. 149. See Golinski's entire discussion of this debate, pp. 129–52.

  56 Maurice Crosland, "Research Schools of Chemistry from Lavoisier to Wurtz," British Journal for the History of Science (2003), p. 338.

  57 Joseph Priestley, "Considerations on the Doctrine of Phlogiston, and the Decomposition of Water" (Philadelphia, 1796).

  58 Smithson seems to have been fully engaged over the matter; the title page verso of his original 1630 copy of the Essays dejean Rey–a prescient seventeenth-century drafting of Lavoisier's ideas—is marked with a stamp "BRITISH MUSEUM/SALE DUPLICATE/1787," which suggests that he might have purchased the book around this time. Smithson Library, SIL.

  5. Science and Revolution, 1788–1791

  1 Rhoda Rappaport, "Jean-Louis Giraud Soulavie," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 12, pp. 549–50 (DSB).

  2 In 1787 the Royal Society established new rules for the admission of foreign members. The number was to be limited to one hundred, and each certificate had to be signed by six members (foreign or domestic) and presented some time between Easter 1787 and the end of November, the ballot to take place the Easter following. This vote before Easter 1788 was the first election of foreign members under the new rules. Charles Blagden draft letter to Claude Louis Berthollet, April 27, 1787, Blagden Letter book, MS Osborn fc 15, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Soulavie's certificate and rejectio
n can be found in the Royal Society Archives, Ref. No. EC/1787/24.

  3 Joseph Banks to Antoine Lavoisier, April 8, 1788; Papiers Lavoisier, Archives du Comte de Chabrol, Archives de 1'Academie des Sciences, Paris; published in Michelle Goupil and Henri Kagan, Oeuvres de Lavoisier, Correspondance, vol. V, 1787–1788 (Paris, 1993), p. 153.

  4 William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Frederick A. Pottle, eds, Boswell for the Defence, 1769–1774 (Melbourne, 1960), p. 274.

  5 Smithson's trip to Paris is discerned from his bank ledgers at Hoare's, vol. 32 (1788–9), f. 76, and from passport control information in Paris: the "Etat des Etrangers qui ont loger à Paris en Chambres Gamier, Dans les Hotels ou auberges depuis le 2 Juillet 1788 Jusqu'au 4 Indus," Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Controle des Etrangers, Registre 91. I am grateful to Anne Eschapasse for her tip to check this archive. Entry for Sir William Hamilton in John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 456–60.

  6 The emphasis is Greville's. Charles Greville to Sir Joseph Banks, n.d., BL Add MS 33982, f. 238.

  7 Smithson to Greville, July 16, n.y. [1802]. BL Add MS 42071, f. 166.

  8 Michael P. Cooper, "Greville, Charles Francis (1749–1809)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004). See also Lawrence H. Conklin, "James Sowerby, His Publications and Collections," Mineralogical Record 26 (1995), pp. 85–105.

  9 J. Andrews, Letters to a Young Gentleman on his setting out for France (1784), p. 2.

  10 Davies Giddy diary, note of 1831, in the entry of June 23, 1791; DG15/1791–95, CRO.

  11 Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Controle des Etrangers, Registre 91 and Vol. 67. The registers at Spa give no notice of Smithson appearing in Spa; Liste des Seigneurs et Dames Venus aux Eaux Minerales de Spa, L'An 1788. Many thanks to Vyvyan Lyle for her work on this.

  12 Arthur Young, Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788 & 1789, Constantia Maxwell, ed. (Cambridge, 1950), p. 374.

  13 Entry for Friday September 19, 1788; Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Surveillance des Etrangers en France, September, October 1788, vol. 70. In Switzerland they might have picked up another companion, a Baron Cogels, member of an ancient Antwerp banking family, as the other passport control register (vol. 91), listing place of abode in Paris, gives Macie and Greville and a Milord Cogels, "Gentilhomme D'Anvers," together at the Hotel du Moscovie on rue des Petits Augustins.

  14 Katherine Gilbert Dapp, George Keate, esq., eighteenth-century English gentleman (Philadelphia, 1939), p. 30.

  15 The Earl of Ilchester, ed., Thejoumal of Lady Elizabeth Holland (1791–1811) (London, 1908), vol. 1, p. 67.

  16 Lydie Touret, "Charles-çs Exchaquet (1746–1792) et les Plans en Relief du Mont-Blanc," Annals of Science 46 (1989), pp. 1–20. See G. R. de Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (London, 1930), p. 181. Smithson's copy of Instructions pour les voyageurs (Berne, 1787) is in the Smithson Library, SIL.

  17 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes: précédés d'un essai sur I'histoire naturelle des environs de Genève, 4 vols (Neuchâtel, 1779–96). De Saussure offered a reward to the first person who scaled Mont Blanc; it was claimed in 1786, the year before de Saussure managed his own ascent. In the summer of 1788, around the time of Smithson's visit, de Saussure spent sixteen days making observations on the Col de Geant. Blagden to Banks, August 9, 1788, printed in G. R. de Beer, "Some Letters of Sir Charles Blagden," Notes and Records of the Royal Society (1951), p. 254.

  18 See A. E. Sayous, "La haute bourgeoisie de Genéve et ses travaux scientifiques," Zeitschrifi fur Schweizerische Geschichte 20 (2), pp. 195–227.

  19 Douglas William Freshfield, The Life of Horace Benedict de Saussure (London, 1920), pp. 161–2.

  20 De Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps, p. 179.

  21 Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (New York, 1980), p. 40.

  22 Smithson's Hoare's ledgers show a payment of £40 to Perregaux & Co. on September 27, 1788. See also "Jean-Frédéric Perregaux et le Comite des Banquiers et des Agents de Change," in Jean Bouchary, Les Manieurs d'Argent à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe Siecle, 3 vols (Paris, 1939–43). Mary Berry quoted in Geoffrey de Bellaigue, "Jean-Frédéric Perregaux: The Englishman's Best Friend," Antologia di Belle Arti (1986), pp. 80–90.

  23 Etat Actuel de Paris; ou Le Provincial à Paris, ouvrage indispensable a ceux qui veulent connoitre & parcourir Paris sans faire aucune question, 4 vols (1788), pp. 122–7.

  24 C. C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980), p. 191.

  25 Harold B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743–1820 (London, 1988), p. 222.

  26 Quoted in V. A. Eyles, "The Evolution of a Chemist, Sir James Hall, Bt., F.R.S., P. R.S.E." Annals of Science 19 (1963), pp. 167–8. See also Arthur Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution (Oxford, 1993), pp. 175–6.

  27 Arthur Young, Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788 & 1789 (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 82–3.

  28 R. Hahn, "Scientific Careers in Eighteenth-century France," in Maurice P. Crosland, ed., 77 ie Emergence of Science in Western Europe (New York, 1976), pp. 132–4.

  29 Etat Actuel de Paris (1788).

  30 R. Hookyaas, "René-Just Haüy," DSB, pp. 178–83. Smithson frequently mentioned Haüy in his papers, and his library contains several of Haüy's publications, most inscribed "A Monsieur Smitson [sic], hommage de l'auteur." Smithson Library, SIL.

  31 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 273–4. See also D. C. Goodman, "William Hyde Wollaston," DSB, pp. 486–94. Rome de I'lsle was the other chief architect of crystallography, and his extensive cabinet of crystallography, located near the Palais Royal, was justly renowned in Paris as one of a kind. He guided visitors through the collection, engagingly illustrating the structure of crystals first with large-scale wooden models he had crafted before leading visitors to the actual specimens. Smithson owned and referred constantly to de Elsie's Crystallographie of 1783, which he might have acquired here in Paris on this trip. In a letter to Fabbroni in Florence in 1794 Smithson mentions having checked Fabbroni's specimens against the figures in de I'lsle—an indication probably that he was traveling with his own marked-up copy. Smithson Library, SIL.

  32 William Thomson to Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti, July 23, 1793. Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti Papers 75, vol. 4, Biblioteca Nationale Centrale di Firenze (BNCF).

  33 Macie to Fabbroni, December 23, 1793; B F113 APS Fabbroni Papers. In 1804 he wrote to another friend, "You remember perhaps that my cabinet is almost wholly confined to small good crystals separated from their matrix or rock." Smithson to unknown [Ricca or Santi], September 4, 1804; Autografi Porri: 36/15, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena.

  34 William Thomson to John Hawkins, December 14, 1789. Hawkins Papers, J3/2/34, CRO. I am grateful to Hugh Torrens for bringing this letter to my attention.

  35 Bulletin of the Proceedings of the National Institute, July 12, 1841; SIA, R U 7078, Box 11.

  36 RS Archives, Ref. No. EC/1788/13.

  37 Wilcke does not appear to have been someone Smithson knew personally; he seems to have signed the certificate on the basis of his knowledge of Wilcke's publications; RS Archives, Ref. No. EC/1788/22. There is no evidence in the archives of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm that Smithson ever corresponded with Wilcke. Nor does he appear to have visited Stockholm to attend a seance of the Academy. Correspondence with the Academy of Sciences, November 2001.

  38 Duke of Dorset to Lord Carmarthen, quoted in John Goldworth Alger, Englishmen in the French Revolution (London, 1889), p. 25.

  39 James L. Macie to Charles Greville, January 1, 1792; BL Add MS 41199, f. 82.

  40 Papers of Tliomas Jefferson, vol. 14, pp. 420–22 (January 8, 1789), quoted in Peter Burley, Witness to the Revolution: British and American Despatches from France, 1788–94 (London, 1989), p. 21.

 
41 Quoted in Peter M. Jones, "Living the Enlightenment and the French Revolution: James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and Their Sons," The Historical Journal 42 (1999), p. 181.

  42 Davies Giddydiary, DG 15 (1791–5), CRO.

  43 Burke quotes from the excellent Maurice Crosland, "The Image of Science as a Threat: Burke versus Priestley and the 'Philosophic Revolution,'" British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987), pp. 277–307 (in particular pp. 284, 288).

  44 Quoted in Simon Schaffer, "Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century," History of Science xxi (1983), p. 25.

  45 "Library and laboratory" in Blagden to Kirwan, March 20, 1790; Blagden Papers 7.322, RS. Chevenix story in The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, A. J. C. Hare, ed. (London, 1895), vol. 1, p. 70.

  46 The only reference to Smithson's continuation of Fourcroy's work is an illegible mention in a draft of a letter Blagden wrote to Kirwan, March 20, 1790; Blagden Papers 7.322, Royal Society. Fourcroy's experiments on liver, part of his study of the changes animal matter underwent in putrefaction, were spurred by his being witness to the exhumation of over a thousand corpses from an abandoned cemetery, and the discovery—well-known to grave-diggers but a shock to scientists—that muscles and fat converted to a greasy spermaceti-like substance. See W. A. Smeaton, Fourcroy, Chemist and Revolutionary (1755–1809) (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 141–2.

  47 James L. Macie to Charles Greville, October 6, n.y. [1790 or 1791]; BL Add MS 42071, ff. 164–5.

  48 "An Account of the Tabasheer, in a letter from Patrick Russell, M.D. F.R.S. to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 80 (1790), pp. 273–83. Blagden to Berthollet, September 3, 1790; Blagden Papers 7.442, RS.

  49 James Macie, "An Account of Some Chemical Experiments on Tabasheer," Philosophical Transactions 81 (1791).

  50 Blagden to Kirwan, July 25, 1791, and Blagden to Berthollet, July 22, 1791; Blagden Papers 7.546 and 7.543, RS.