d well-beloved counsellors," and so on, in the skilfully graduated
language of diplomacy. The institution that had the King for patron and
such notables for officers seemed assured a bright career from the very
beginning. In name and in personnel it had the flavor of aristocracy,
a flavor that never palls on British palate. And right well the
institution has fulfilled its promise, though in a far different way
from what its originator and founder anticipated.

Its originator and founder, I say, and say advisedly; for, of course,
here, as always, there is one man who is the true heart and soul of the
movement, one name that stands, in truth, for the whole project, and to
which all the other names are mere appendages. You would never suspect
which name it is, in the present case, from a study of the charter,
for it appears well down the file of graded titles, after "cousins" and
"counsellors" have had their day, and is noted simply as "our trusty
and well-beloved Benjamin, Count of Rumford, of the Holy Roman Empire."
Little as there is to signalize it in the charter, this is the name of
the sole projector of the enterprise in its incipiency, of the
projector of every detail, of the writer of the charter itself even. The
establishment thus launched with royal title might with full propriety
have been called, as indeed it sometimes is called, the Rumford
Institution.

The man who thus became the founder of this remarkable institution was
in many ways a most extraordinary person. He was an American by birth,
and if not the most remarkable of Americans, he surely was destined to
a more picturesque career than ever fell to the lot of any of his
countrymen of like eminence. Born on a Massachusetts farm, he was a
typical "down-east Yankee," with genius added to the usual shrewd,
inquiring mind and native resourcefulness. He was self-educated and
self-made in the fullest sense in which those terms can be applied. At
fourteen he was an unschooled grocer-lad--Benjamin Thompson by name--in
a little New England village; at forty he was a world-famous savant,
as facile with French, Italian, Spanish, and German as with his native
tongue; he had become vice-president and medallist of the Royal
Society, member of the Berlin National Academy of Science, of the French
Institute, of the American Academy of Science, and I know not what other
learned bodies; he had been knighted in Great Britain after serving
there as under-secretary of stat