An account of the Smithsonian Institution : its origin, history, objects and achievements / [G. Brown Goode].

  • Goode, G. Brown (George Brown), 1851-1896.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the Smithsonian Institution : its origin, history, objects and achievements / [G. Brown Goode]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    been better fitted for the task. For more than thirty years he had been a student of the native races of this continent. He and his associates in the Bureau have succeeded in placing on record, before it was too late, a vast number of facts in regard to the Indians. The Annual Reports of the Bureau, twelve in number, and nine volumes of Contributions to North American Ethnology, with the Bulletin of the Bureau, form a consider- able library in themselves. The archives still contain much unpublished material, including hundreds of vocabularies. A complete linguistic classification of the native languages of the United States has been prepared by the Director, and an effective classification of the tribes on the reservation, reducing materially the danger of warlike outbreaks, has already been accomplished: Important explorations of the western continent have been made by the Bureau staff, especially those of the Stevensons, Cushing, Fewkes, and the Mindeleffs, among the Pueblo people and the ruins of the Southwest; those of Holmes among the prehistoric quarry sites and villages of the eastern part of the continent; those of Thomas among the mounds of the Mississippi valley, and of McGee among the Papago and Seri Indians of the Mexican boundary; and the notable explora- tions of Powell himself, among the tribes of Utah, California, Arizona and New Mexico. THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE. At the time of the Smithson bequest the endownment of re- search had scarcely been attempted in America. There were schools and colleges in which science was taught, and certain of the teachers employed in these institutions were engaged in original investigation. There were a few young and struggling scientific societies, very limited in extent and influence, but at that time the chief outcome of American scientific work. Science in America was an infant in swaddling clothes. Fifty years have passed, and American science now stands by the side of the science of Great Britain, of German)^, of France, a fellow worker, competing on an equal footing in nearly every field of research. The Smithsonian Institution did what was, at the time of its