James Smithson Biography

Dromo's Den

SMITHSON, James (1765-1829). A British mineralogist and the founder of the Smithsonian Institution (q.v.) at Washington. In early life he was known as James Lewis (or Louis) Macie. He was born in France, the natural son of Hugh Smithson, first Duke of Northumberland, and of Mrs. Elizabeth Keate Macie, a member of the Hungerford family of Studley. He studied at Pembroke College, Oxford, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1787. He read 28 papers before the Royal Society and published 18 in Thomson's Annals of Philosophy. A large collection of minerals left by him were destroyed by fire in the Smithsonian Institution Building in 1865. He was associated with some of the most notable scientists of his time. Smithson passed a large part of his life on the Continent and died in Genoa, Italy. His remains were removed to the United States in 1904 and are interred in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithson was never in America, and it is not known what induced him to give his fortune to the United States, except that a sense of wrong in the illegitimacy of his birth alienated him from his native land. Relative to his bequest, he wrote: "My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands and the Percies are extinct and forgotten." Consult: W. J. Rhees, "Smithson and his Bequest," and "Scientific Writings of James Smithson," in Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections, vol. xxi (Washington, 1879-80); S. P. Langley, "James Smithson,'* in The Smithsonian Institution, 1846 to 1896 (ed. by G. B. Goode, ib., 1897); id., Removal of the Remains of James Smithson (ib., 1904).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXI (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 205.