SCIENCE

The earliest scientific discoveries in North America were made by investigators sent from Europe, where they returned to publish their reports. Among them were such early explorers as Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and Mark Catesby (1679?–1749) from England. Their mission was to explore the biosphere of a little-known part of the world, an enterprise for which Linnaeus, the great systematizer of the time, also sent from Sweden his own emissary, Pehr Kalm (1716–1779). Dating from 1662, the Royal Society of London provided a natural focus for such information coming from the colonies in North America and elsewhere in the expanding British empire.

European interest centered on New World fauna and flora, especially on plants having economic or medicinal potential and, to a lesser extent, those that might enhance gardens or diversify forests. By the eighteenth century, resident naturalists were available to carry out these tasks of discovery and collection. Most notable was John Bartram (1699–1777), whose garden near Philadelphia became the major depot for the exchange of plants between the new world and the old. Bartram supplied at least two hundred new plants to English gardens, and he received from England countless new fruit trees and flowers in return. With the financial assistance of an English friend, Peter Collinson, Bartram collected plants from as far north as Lake Ontario and as far south as Florida. Collinson also encouraged Bartram's correspondence with such luminaries as Buffon in France, Gronovius in Holland, and with Linnaeus himself. Collinson published extracts from Bartram's letters in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and got him appointed Botanist to the King. Yet the time was not ripe for colonists to publish independent scientific papers. Even after independence, the Lutheran clergyman Gotthilf Henry Muhlenberg (1753–1815), who proposed a nationwide census of America's flora, continued to send his own botanical discoveries to Carl Willdenow for publication in Berlin.

Although the term "natural philosophy" originally included all varieties of scientific endeavor, by the eighteenth century a pragmatic distinction had been reached between natural philosophy (mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and, roughly, what physics includes today) and natural history (botany, zoology, and, to some extent, geology). Individuals might practice in both categories, but contributions in natural philosophy clearly brought them greater prestige. The centerpiece of the age was Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), which expounded the theory of gravitation and required an exceptional grasp of mathematics even to understand it. Mathematics was the weakest area of learning in American colleges, both before and after the Revolution. One who tried to excel in both areas was New York's Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776), educated in Scotland and best known for his History of the Five Indian Nations (1745–1755). Colden mastered the Linnaean system of classification so well that his catalog of plants was published by Linnaeus in Sweden; but Colden's speculative theory about the source of gravitation, which he thought improved upon Newton, was scorned by Europeans and only puzzled Americans.

VENUS'S-FLYTRAP

Found only in nitrogen-poor bogs along the Carolina coast, this little insectivorous plant was brought to the attention of European naturalists in 1759 by Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), royal governor of North Carolina. John Bartram made several unsuccessful attempts to supply his English friends with viable seeds of what he called the "little tipitiwitchet," and finally a living plant reached John Ellis in 1768. Ellis, an English correspondent of Linnaeus, wrote that the leaf of the clever plant has "many minute red glands, that cover its inner surface, and which perhaps discharge sweet liquor, tempt the poor animal to taste them: and the instant these tender parts are irritated by its feet, the two lobes rise up, grasp it fast, lock the rows of spines together, and squeeze it to death." Such apparent volition in the vegetable kingdom caused Charles Darwin a century later to call this plant "one of the most wonderful in the world."

Ellis was wrong about the function of the red glands (they secrete digestive juice), and he got the commonplace white flowers wrong (they are in cymose clusters), but in Uppsala, Sweden, Linnaeus published his description and the scientific name he gave it. In 1768, in a letter to The St. James's Chronicle, Ellis wrote that "I shall call it Dionaea Muscipula, which may be construed into English, with humble Submission both to Critics and foreign Commentators, either Venus's Flytrap, or Venus's Mousetrap." Today it is commonly called Venus's-flytrap.

Charles Boewe

bibliography: Lloyd, Francis Ernest. The Carnivorous Plants. New York: Dover Publications, 1976. Nelson, E. Charles. Aphrodite's Mousetrap: A Biography of Venus's Flytrap with … a "Tipitiwitchet" Postscript by Daniel L. McKinley. Aberystwyth, U.K.: Boethius Press, 1990.

After several false starts, the American Philosophical Society was firmly established in Philadelphia by 1769 and the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences in Boston by 1780. These two professional organizations, as well as a few specialized societies such as those for the promotion of agriculture, gave new momentum to American science. By providing publication outlets they also began to perform locally what earlier had depended on the Royal Society's Transactions and other European learned journals. They made possible, especially in Boston and Philadelphia, greater attention to natural philosophy, which often required apparatus a lone investigator could ill afford.

The first important opportunity for a significant North American contribution to natural philosophy came with the 1769 transit of the planet Venus across the sun's surface, a phenomenon that would not occur again for 105 years. This rare astronomical event could be observed in entirety only in the Western Hemisphere. In all, twenty-two sets of observations were made in the British colonies, many of them reported both in the Transactions of the Royal Society and in those of the American Philosophical Society. Accurate measurements of the transit from widely separated observation points on earth were necessary for the calculation of the specific distances between bodies in our solar system, which had been known only as relative distances. For the observations in Philadelphia alone an impressive array of instruments was assembled, including four telescopes, a sextant, and the most accurate clock available. There David Rittenhouse (1732–1796) built an observatory for the event. Second only to Franklin as a natural philosopher, Rittenhouse went on to experiment in magnetism and optics. As an accomplished clockmaker, he also built mechanical models of the solar system called orreries.

Similar astronomical work was carried out by Harvard's Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop (1714–1779), scion of a family of natural philosophers. Winthrop not only enriched Harvard's mathematics curriculum by his introduction of calculus, but he also was a supporter of Benjamin Franklin's theory of electricity and the teacher of Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814). During the Revolution Winthrop remained a staunch Patriot, while his student Thompson, a Loyalist, eventually became Count Rumford in Europe, where his experimental work anticipated the replacement of the caloric theory of heat by the vibration theory. It remained for Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), whose experiments enabled him to explain electricity as a single "fluid" having a positive or negative charge, to become the first American scientist universally admired by Europeans.

early republic

Once it became an independent country, the United States could encourage science by financing it, though Congress long remained reluctant to do so. The first federal project of real consequence was the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806, for which Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) was briefed by members of the American Philosophical Society on making scientific collections, while William Clark (1770–1838) was already an accomplished surveyor and map maker. Others had to describe and interpret the data they brought back, an effort attempted by several members of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, organized in 1812. After that, much of the early scientific exploration of the trans-Mississippi West was conducted by Europeans like the Englishman Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859). Like

Nuttall, some of them were financed by the private philanthropy of members of the Academy, who, in turn, expected to reap the intellectual benefits of their investment. There resulted a struggle between the field naturalists, who did the work and wanted credit for their own discoveries, and the sedentary naturalists, who controlled the press, the libraries, and the museums that were essential for the interpretation and publication of data discovered in the field.

Because of the paucity of college courses in the natural sciences, medicine long served as a training ground for naturalists, and the nation's earliest medical journal, Samuel Latham Mitchill's Medical Repository (which ran from 1797 to 1824) published more on natural history than it did on medicine. In 1818 it was joined by a periodical of wider scope, the American Journal of Science, edited by Benjamin Silliman at Yale, where he made that university a leading center for chemistry and geology. Mitchill (1764–1831) and Silliman (1779–1864) were the chief American advocates of the transformation of chemistry being carried out by Antoine Lavoisier in France that clarified the nature of combustion and introduced the terminology for elements and compounds still used today. However, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who had disputed Lavoisier, continued to defend the earlier phlogiston theory of combustion after he left England in 1794 and settled in Pennsylvania.

In geology William Maclure (1763–1840) published a geological map in 1809 that covered the nation up to the Mississippi River; it derived from his own fieldwork based on the surface collection of rocks. In 1822 Amos Eaton (1776–1842) had the advantage of the cuts made for the Erie Canal to attempt a stratigraphic analysis of a portion of New York State. Both geologists relied on the mineral classification scheme devised in Saxony by Abraham Gottlob Werner. Though geology remained tied to mineralogy, C. S. Rafinesque (1783–1840) suggested in 1818 that sedimentary strata could be classified by the fossils they contain. The chemical analysis of minerals had been advanced in 1801 by the invention of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe by Robert Hare (1781–1858), who later became a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Like Rittenhouse before him, Hare also excelled in the construction of instruments for his experiments, including those for generating electricity.

Philadelphia and Boston remained the principal centers for scientific research. Also of great importance was the Lyceum of Natural History, established in 1817 in New York City, which changed its name to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1876 and survives as a general scientific society. Less enduring scientific societies were started in Albany, Charleston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis to channel professional interests as college curricula also broadened to include botany, zoology, geology, and the application of science to such utilitarian fields as surveying. The marriage of science and industry took place in 1824, for in that year was founded in upstate New York the forerunner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and in Philadelphia the Franklin Institute—both institutions designed to provide scientific underpinning for the advancing industrial revolution.

bibliography

Bates, Ralph S. Scientific Societies in the United States, 3rd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

Elliott, Clark A. Biographical Dictionary of American Science: The Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Greene, John C. American Science in the Age of Jefferson. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984.

Harkányi, Katalin, comp. The Natural Sciences and American Scientists in the Revolutionary Era: A Bibliography. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Hazen, Robert M., and Margaret Hindle Hazen. American Geological Literature, 1669–1850. Stroudsburg, Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson, and Ross, 1980.

Hindle, Brooke. The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956; New York: Norton, 1974.

Hornberger, Theodore. Scientific Thought in the American Colleges, 1638–1800. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1945; New York: Octagon Books, 1968.

Meisel, Max. A Bibliography of American Natural History: The Pioneer Century 1769–1865. 3 vols. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Premier Publishing Co., 1924–1929.

Oleson, Alexandra, and Sanborn C. Brown, eds. The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Smallwood, William Martin, and Mabel Sarah Coon Smallwood. Natural History and the American Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

Stearns, Raymond P. Science in the British Colonies of America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.

Charles Boewe