ABSTRACT
Research is the backbone of the Smithsonian, and it goes out to the world through the Institution's exhibits, publications, lectures, correspondence, and nearly every other activity. The Bureau of American Ethnology or "the Bureau," as it has been no longer exists as such, but it played so important a role in the institution's history that it deserves a sort of Requiescat in pace recognition. Technically, it passed into history as a separate organization on July 29, 1964, when it was merged with the National Museum's Department of Anthropology to form the Smithsonian Department of Anthropology, but its memory lingers on. Astronomy was indigenous to the Smithsonian environment. John Quincy Adams had strongly advocated the establishment of an observatory. As a physicist, Joseph Henry was profoundly interested in astronomy. He had included it among prime Smithsonian concerns, and in many ways he laid the foundation for an observatory's ultimate establishment.
