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 1888 
 
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 jV. 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS 
 
 
 AMERICAN SCIENCE 
 
 THE THIRD CENTURY. 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
 MEETING OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 BROWN GOODE 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. 
 
 From the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume IV, 1886-1 
 
 WASHINGTON : 
 PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 
 
 1888. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN SCIENCE 
 
 THE THIRD CENTURY. 
 
 AN .ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY 
 
 MEETING OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 BY 
 
 G. BROWN GOODE, 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY. 
 
 From the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume IV, 1886-1 
 
 WASHINGTON : 
 
 PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 
 1888. 
 
LOAN STAC* 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE.* 
 THE THIRD CENTURY. 
 
 BY G. BROWN GOODE. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 In the address which it was my privilege, one year ago, to read 
 in the presence of this Society, I attempted to trace the progress 
 of scientific activity in America from the time of the first settle- 
 ment by the English in 1505 to the end of the Revolution a 
 period of nearly two hundred years. 
 
 Resuming the subject, I shall now take up the consideration 
 of the third century from 1782 to the present time. For con- 
 venience of discussion the time is divided, approximately, into 
 decades, while the decades naturally fall into gioups of three. 
 From 1780 to 1810, from 1810 to 1840, from 1840 to 1870, and 
 from 1870 to the close of tho century, are periods in the history 
 of American thought, each of which seems to be marked by 
 characteristics of its own. These must have names, and it may 
 not be inappropriate to call the first the period of Jefferson, the 
 second that of Silliman, and the 1hird that of Agassiz. 
 
 The first was, of course, an extension of the period of Linnaeus, 
 the second and third were during the mental supremacy of Cuvier 
 and Von Baer and their schools, and the fourth or present, begin- 
 ing in 1870, belongs to that of Darwin, the extension of whose 
 influence to America was delayed by the tumults of the civil con- 
 vulsion which began in 1861 and ended in 1865. 
 
 The " beginnings of American science" do not belong entirely 
 
 * Annual Presidential Address delivered at the Seventh Anniversary 
 Meeting of the Biological Society ot Washington, January 22, 1887, in 
 the Lecture Room of the U. S. National Museum. 
 
 /27 
 
 u 
 
 & 
 
 151 
 
10 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 to the past. Our science is still in its youth, and in the discus- 
 sion of its history I shall not hesitate to refer to institutions and 
 to tendencies which are of very recent origin. 
 
 It is somewhat unfortunate that the account book of national 
 progress was so thoroughly balanced in the Centennial year. It 
 is true that the movement which resulted in the birth of our Re- 
 public first took tangible form in 17765 but the infant nation was 
 not born until 1783, when the treaty of Paris was signed, and 
 lay in swaddling clothes until 1789, when the Constitution was 
 adopted by the thirteen States. 
 
 In those days our forefathers had quite enough to do in adapt- 
 ing their lives to the changed conditions of existence. The 
 masses were struggling for securer positions near home, or were 
 pushing out beyond the frontiers to find dwelling-places for them- 
 selves and their descendants. The men of education were in- 
 volved in political discussions as fierce, uncandid, and unphilo- 
 sophical in spirit as those which preceded the French revolution 
 of the same period. 
 
 The master minds were absorbed in political and administra- 
 tive problems, and had little time for the peaceful pursuits of 
 science, and many of the men who were prominent in science 
 Franklin, Jefferson, Rush, Mite hill, Seybert, Williamson, Mor- 
 gan, Clinton, Rittenhouse, Patterson, Williams, Cutler, Ma- 
 rlure, and others were elected to Congress or called to other 
 positions of official responsibility. 
 
 IX. 
 
 The literary and scientific activities of the infant nation were 
 for many years chiefly concentrated in Philadelphia, until 1800 
 the federal capital and largest of American cities. Here, after 
 the return of Franklin from France in 1785, the meetings of the 
 American Philosophical Society were resumed. Franklin con- 
 tinued to be its president until his death in 1790, at the same 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 11 
 
 time holding the presidency of the commonwealth of Pennsyl- 
 vania, and a seat in the Constitutional Convention. The pres- 
 tige of its leader doubtless gave to the Society greater promi- 
 nence than its scientific objects alone would have secured. 
 
 In the reminiscences of Dr. Manasseh Cutler there is to be 
 found an admirable picture of Franklin in 1787. As we read it 
 we are taken back into the very presence of the philosopher and 
 statesman, and can form a very clear appreciation of the scien- 
 tific atmosphere which surrounded the scientific leaders of the 
 post- Revolutionary period. 
 
 Dr. Cutler wrote : 
 
 " Dr. Franklin lives on Market street. His house stands up a 
 court at some distance from the street. We found him in his 
 garden sitting upon a grass-plot, under a large mulberry tree, 
 with several gentlemen and two or three ladies. When Mr. 
 Gerry introduced me he rose from his chair, took me by the 
 hand, expressed his joy at seeing me, welcomed me to the city, 
 and begged me to seat myself close by him. His voice was low, 
 his countenance open, frank, and pleasing. I delivered to him 
 my letters. After he had read them he took me again by the 
 hand and. with the usual compliments, introduced me to the 
 other gentlemen, who are, most of them, members of the Con- 
 vention. Here we entered into a free conversation, and spent the 
 time most agreeably until it was quite dark. The tea-table was 
 spread under the tree, and Mrs. Bache, who is the only daughter 
 of the Doctor and lives with him, served it to the company. 
 
 The Doctor showed me a curiosity which he had just received 
 and with which he was much pleased. It was a snake with two 
 heads, preserved in a large vial. It was about ten inches long, 
 well proportioned, the heads perfect, and united to the body about 
 one-fourth of an inch below the extremities of the jaws. He 
 showed me a drawing of one entirely similar, found near Lake 
 Champlain. He spoke of the situation of this snake if it was 
 travelling among bushes, and one head should choose to go on one 
 side of the stem of a bush and the other head should prefer the 
 other side, and neither head would consent to come back or give 
 way to the other. He was then going to mention a humorous 
 matter that had that day occurred in the Convention in conse- 
 quence of his comparing the snake to America ; for he seemed 
 to forget that everything in the Convention was to be kept a pro- 
 found secret. But this was suggested to him, and I was deprived 
 of the storv. 
 
12 BIOLOGICAL SOOCETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 " After it was dark we went into the house, and he invited me to 
 his library, which is likewise his study. It is a very large cham- 
 ber and high-studded. The walls are covered with shelves filled 
 with books ; beside these, four large alcoves, extending two-thirds 
 the length of the chamber, fdled in the same manner. I presume 
 this is the largest and by far the best private library in America. 
 He showed me a glass machine for exhibiting the circulation of 
 the blood in the arteries and veins of the human body. 'The cir- 
 culation is exhibited by the passing of a red fluid from a reservoir 
 into numerous capillary tubes of glass, ramified in every direction, 
 and then returning in similar tubes to the reservoir, which was 
 clone with great velocity, and without any power acting visibly 
 upon the fluid, and had the appearance of perpetual motion. 
 Another great curiosity was a rolling press for taking copies of 
 letters or other writing. A sheet of paper is completely copied 
 in two minutes, the copy as fair as the original, and without de- 
 facing it in the smallest degree. It is an invention of his own, 
 extremely useful in many circumstances of life. He also showed 
 us his long artificial hand and arm for taking down and putting 
 up books on high shelves, out of reach, and his great arm-chair, 
 with rockers and a large fan placed over it, with which he fans 
 himself, while he sits reading, with only a slight motion of the 
 foot, and many other curiosities and inventions, all his own, but 
 of lesser note. Over his mantel he has :i prodigious number of 
 medals, busts, and casts in wax or plast v of Paris, which are the 
 effigies of the most noted characters of Europe. But what the 
 Doctor wished especially to show me was a huge volume on bot- 
 any, which indeed afforded me the greatest pleasure of any one 
 thing in liis library. It was a single volume, but so large that it 
 was with great difficulty that he was able to raise it from a low 
 shelf arid lift it 1o the table ; but, with that senile ambition which 
 is common to old people (Dr. Franklin was eighty-one), he in- 
 sisted on doing it himself, and would permit no one to assist him, 
 merely to show how much strength he had remaining. It con- 
 tained the whole of Linnaeus's Systema Vegetabilium, with large 
 cuts colored from nature of every plant. It was a feast to me, 
 and the Doctor seemed to enjoy it as well as myself. We spent 
 a couple of hours examining this volume, While the other gentle- 
 men amused themselves with other matters. The Doctor is not 
 a botanist, but lamented he did not in early life attend to this 
 science. He delights in natural history, and expressed an earnest 
 wish that I should pursue a plan I had begun, and hoped this 
 science, so much neglected in America, would be pursued with 
 as much ardor here as it is now in every part of Europe. I 
 wanted, for three months at least, to have devoted myself entirely 
 to this one volume, but, fearing lest I should become tedious to 
 him, I shut the book, though he urged me to examine it longer. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 13 
 
 He seemed extremely fond, through the course of the visit, of 
 dwelling on philosophical subjects, and particularly that of natu- 
 ral history, while the other gentlemen were swallowed up in poli- 
 tics. This was a favorable circumstance to me, for almost all his 
 conversation was addressed to me, and I was highly delighted 
 with the extensive knowledge he appeared to possess of every 
 subject, the brightness of his faculties, the clearness and vivacity 
 of his mental powers, and the strength of his memory, notwith- 
 standing his age. His manners are perfectly easy, and everything 
 about him seems to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happi- 
 ness. He has an incessant vein of humor, accompanied with an 
 uncommon vivacity that seems as natural and involuntary as his 
 breathing." 
 
 To Franklin, as President of the Philosophical Society, suc- 
 ceeded David Rittenhouse [b. 1732, d. 1796]^ man of world-wide 
 reputation, known in his day as " the American Philosopher."* 
 
 He was an astronomer of repute, and his observatory built at 
 Norriton in preparation for the transit of Venus in 1769 seems to 
 have been the first in America. His orrery, constructed upon an 
 original plan, was one of the wonders of the land. His most 
 important contribution to astronomy was the introduction of the 
 use of spider lines in the focus of transit instruments.! 
 
 He was an amateur botanist, and in 1771 made interesting 
 physiological experiments upon the electric eel.J 
 
 He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and the 
 first Director of the United States Mint. 
 
 Next in prominence to Franklin and Rittenhouse were doubt- 
 less the medical professors, Benjamin Rush, William Shippen, 
 John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, Samuel Powell Griffiths, and Cas- 
 par Wistar, all men of scientific tastes, but too busy in pub- 
 lic affairs and in medical instruction to engage deeply in research, 
 for Philadelphia, in those days as at present, insisted that all 
 
 * See obituary in the European Magazine, July, 1796; also Memoiis 
 of Rittenhouse, by WILLIAM BARTON, 1813, and Eulogium by Benjamin 
 Rush, 1796. 
 
 t VON ZACH : Monatliche Correspondenz, ii, p. 215. 
 
 \ Phila. Medical Repository, vol. I. 
 
14 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 her naturalists should be medical professors, and the active inves- 
 tigators, outside of medical science, were not numerous. Rush, 
 however, was one of the earliest American writers upon eth- 
 nology, and a pathologist of the highest rank. He is generally 
 referred to as the earliest professor of chemistry, having been 
 appointed to the chair of chemistry in the College of Philadel- 
 phia in 1769; it seems certain, however, that Dr. John Morgan 
 lectured on chemistry as early as 1765.* 
 
 Dr. Shippen [b. 1735, d. 1808], the founder of the first 
 medical school [1765] and its professor of anatomy for forty- 
 three years, was still in his prime, and so was Dr. Morgan 
 [b. 1735, d. 1789], a Fellow of the Royal Society, a co-founder 
 of the medical school, and a frequent contributor to the Philo- 
 sophical Transactions. Morgan was an eminent pathologist, 
 and is said to have been the one to originate the theory of the 
 formation of pus by the secretory action of the vessels of the 
 part.f He appears to have been the first who attempted to 
 form a museum of anatomy, having learned the methods of 
 preparation from the Hunters and from Sue in Paris. The 
 beginning was still earlier known, for a collection of anatomical 
 models in wax, obtained by Dr. Abraham Chovet in Paris, was 
 in use by Philadelphia medical students before the Revolution.} 
 
 Another of the physicians of colonial days who lived until 
 after the revolution was Dr. Thomas Cadwallader [b. 1707, 
 d. 1779], whose dissections are said to have been among the 
 earliest made in America, and whose " Essay on the West 
 India Dry Gripes," i775i was one f the earliest medical trea- 
 tises in America. 
 
 Dr. Caspar Wistar [b. 1761, d. 1818] was also a. leader, 
 
 * BARTON'S Memoirs of Rittenhouse, p. 614. 
 t THACHER. American Medical Biography, i. p. 408. 
 J This eventually became the property of the University. See Barton's 
 Rittenhouse, p. 377. Trans. Amer. Phil, fcoc., ii, p. 368. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 15 
 
 and was at various times professor of chemistry and anatomy. 
 His contributions to natural history were descriptions of bones of 
 Megalonyx and other mammals, a study of the human ethmoid, 
 and experiments on evaporation. He was long Vice-President of 
 the Philosophical Society, and in 1815 succeeded Jefferson in its 
 presidency. The Wistar Anatomical Museum of the University 
 and the beautiful climbing shrub Wistaria are among the me- 
 morials to his name.* 
 
 Still another memorial of the venerable naturalist may per- 
 haps be worthy of mention as an illustration of the social condi- 
 tions of science in Philadelphia in early days. A traveller visit- 
 ing the city in 1829 thus described this institution, which was 
 continued until the late war, and then discontinued, but has been 
 resumed within the last year : 
 
 " Dr. Wistar in his lifetime had a party of his liteVary and sci- 
 entific friends at his house, one evening in each week, and to this 
 party strangers visiting the city were also invited. When he died, 
 the same party was continued, and the members of the Wistar 
 party, in their turn, each have a meeting of the club at his house, 
 on some Saturday night in the year. This club consists of the 
 men most distinguished in science, art, literature, and wealth in 
 the city. It opens at early candle-light, when not only the mem- 
 bers themselves appear, but they bring with them all the strangers 
 of distinction in the city."| 
 
 The " Wistar parties" were continued up to the beginning of 
 the civil war in 1861, and have been resumed since 1887. A 
 history of these gatherings would cover a period of three-quarters 
 of a century at the least, and could be made a most valuable and 
 entertaining contribution to scientific literature. 
 
 Packard, in his History of Zoology, \ states that zoology, the 
 world over, has sprung from the study of human anatomy, and 
 
 * HOSACK : Tribute to the Memory of Wistar, New York, 1818. 
 t ATWATER : Remarks made on a tour to Prairie du Chien ; thence to 
 Washington City, in 1829. Columbus, 1831, p. 238. 
 J Standard Natural History, pp. Ixii-lxxii. 
 
1'6 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 that American zoology took its rise, and was fostered chiefly, 
 in Philadelphia, by the professors in the medical schools. 
 
 It was fully demonstrated, I think, in my former address, that 
 there were good zoologists in America long before there were 
 medical schools,. and that Philadelphia was not the cradle of 
 American natural history ; although, during its period of polit- 
 ical pre-eminence, immediately after the Revolution, scientific 
 activities of all kinds centred in that city. As for the medical 
 schools it is at least probable that they have spoiled more nat- 
 uralists than they have fostered. 
 
 Dr. Adam Kuhn [b. 1741, d. 1817] was the professor of 
 botany in 1768* the first in America and was labeled by his 
 contemporaries " the favorite pupil of Linnreus." Professor 
 Gray, in a recent letter to the writer, refers to this saying as a 
 k 'myth;" and it surely seems strange that a disciple be- 
 loved by the great Swede could have done so little for botany. 
 Barton, in a letter, in 1792, to Thunberg, who then occupied 
 the seat of Linnaeus in the University of Upsala, said : 
 
 k ' The electricity of your immortal Linne has hardly been felt 
 in this Ultima Thule of science. Had a number of the pupils of 
 that great man settled in North America its riches would have 
 been better known. But, alas ! the only one pupil of your prede- 
 cessor that has made choice of America as the place of his resi- 
 dence has added nothing to the stock of natural knowledge."! 
 
 The Rev. Nicholas Collin, Rector of the Swedish Churches 
 in Pennsylvania, was a fellow-countryman and acquaintance of 
 Linnaeus \ and an accomplished botanist, having been one of the 
 editors of Muhlenberg's work upon the grasses and an early 
 writer on American linguistics. He read before the Philo- 
 sophical Society, in 1789, "An Essay on those inquiries in 
 
 * See p. 99, ante. 
 
 fB. S. BARTON, in Transactions American Philosophical Society, iii, 
 P- 339- 
 
 t " I often heard the great Linnaeus wish that he could have explored 
 the continent of North America." COLLIN: Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., iii, 
 p. xv. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 17 
 
 Natural Philosophy which at present are most beneficial to the 
 Uni'od States of North America," which was the first attempt 
 to lay out a systematic plan for the direction of scientific re- 
 search in America. One of the most interesting suggestions he 
 made was that the Mammoth was still in existence. 
 
 " The vast Mahmot," said he, " is perhaps yet stalking through 
 the western wilderness ; but if he is no more let us carefully 
 gather his remains, and even try to find a new skeleton of this 
 giant, to whom the elephant was but a calf." * 
 
 Gen. Jonathan Williams, U. S. A. [b. 1750,0!. 1815], was first 
 superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point and 
 " father of the corps of engineers." He was a nephew of 
 Franklin, and his secretary of legation in France, and, after 
 his" return to Philadelphia, was for many years a judge of the 
 court of common pleas, his military career not beginning till 
 1801. This versatile man was a leading member of the Phil- 
 osophical Society and one of its Vice-Presidents. His paper 
 " On the Use of the Thermometer in Navigation " was one of the 
 first American contributions to scientific seamanship. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. John Ewing [b. 1732, d. 1802], also a Vice- 
 President, was Provost of the University. He had been one of 
 the observers of the transit in 1769, of which he published an 
 account in the Transactions of the Philosophical Society. He 
 early printed a volume of lectures on Natural Philosophy, and 
 was the strongest champion of John Godfrey, the Philadelphia!!, 
 in his claim to the invention of the reflecting quad rant, f 
 
 * /</., p. xxiv. 
 
 t" Thomas Godfrey," says a recent authority, "was born in Bristol. 
 Penn., in 1704, and died in Philadelphia in December, 1749. He followed 
 the trade of a glazier in the metropolis, and, having a fondness for mathe- 
 matical studies, marked such books as he met with, subsequently acquir- 
 ing Latin, that he might become familiar with the mathematical work in 
 that language. Having obtained a copy of Newton's ' Principia,' he de- 
 scribed an improvement he had made in Davis' quadrant to James Logan, 
 
18 BIOLOGICAL, SOCIETY OB WASHINGTON. 
 
 Dr. James Woodhouse [b. 1770, d. 1809] was author and ed- 
 itor of several chemical text-books and Professor of Chemistry in 
 the University, a position which he took after it had been refused 
 by Priestley. He made experiments and observations on the 
 vegetation of plants, and investigated the chemical and medical 
 properties of the persimmon tree. He it was who first demon- 
 strated the superiority of anthracite to bituminous coal by reason 
 of its intensity and regularity of heating power.* 
 
 The Rev. Ebenezer Kinnersley [b. in Gloucester, England, 
 Nov. 30, 1711, d. in Philadelphia, July 4, 1778] survived the 
 Revolution, though, in his latter years, not a contributor to 
 science. The associate of Franklin in " the Philadelphia Ex- 
 periments " in electricity, his discoveries were famous in Europe 
 as well as in America.! It is claimed that he originated the 
 theory of the positive and negative in electricity ; that he first 
 demonstrated the passage of electricity through water ; and that 
 he first discovered that heat could be produced by electricitv ; 
 besides inventing numerous mechanical devices of scientific 
 interest. From 1753 to 1772 he was connected with the 
 University of Pennsylvania, where there may still be seen a 
 window dedicated to his memory. 
 
 Having already referred to the history of scientific instruction 
 in America,^ and shown that Hunter lectured on comparative 
 anatomy in Newport in 1754; Kuhn on Botany, in Philadel- 
 phia, in 1768, Waterhouse on natural history and botany, at 
 Cambridge, in 1788" and some unidentified scholars upon chem- 
 istry and natural history, in Philadelphia, in 1785, it would 
 seem unjust not to speak of Kinnersley's career as a lecturer. 
 
 who was so impressed that he at once addressed a letter to Edmund Halley 
 in England, giving a full description of the construction and uses of God- 
 frey's instrument." % 
 
 * SITJLIMAN: American Contributions to Chemistry, p. 13. 
 t See Priestley's History of Electricity. 
 \ P. 99, ante. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 19 
 
 He seems to have been the first to deliver public scientific lec- 
 tures in America, occupying the platform in Philadelphia, New- 
 port, New York, and Boston, from 1751 to the beginning of 
 the Revolution. The following advertisement was printed in 
 the "Pennsylvania Gazette" for April n, 1751: 
 
 NOTICE is hereby given to the Curious that Wednesday next 
 Mr. Kinnersley proposes to begin a Course of Experiments on the 
 newly-discovered Electrical fife, containing not only the most 
 curious of those that have been made and published in Europe, 
 but a considerable Number of New Ones lately made in this City, 
 to be accompanied with methodical Lectures on the Nature and 
 Properties of that Wonderful Element. 
 
 Francis Hopkinson [b. 1737, d. 1791], signer of the Declar- 
 ation of Independence, was treasurer of the Philosophical 
 Society, and among other papers communicated by him was 
 one in 1783, calling attention to the peculiar worm parasitic in 
 the eye of a horse. The " horse with a snake in its eye" was 
 on public exhibition in Philadelphia in 1782, and was the 
 object of much attention, for the nature and habits of this peculiar 
 Filaria were not so well understood then as now. 
 
 The father of Francis, Thomas Hopkinson [b. in London, 
 1709, d. in Philadelphia, 1751], who was overlooked in my 
 previous address, deserves, at least, a passing mention. Coining 
 to Philadelphia in 1731 he became lawyer >( prothonotary, Judge 
 of the Admiralty, and member of the Provincial Council. As 
 an incorporator of the Philadelphia Library Company, and origi- 
 nal trustee of the College of Philadelphia, and first President 
 of the American Philosophical Society in 1743, his public spirit 
 is worthy of our admiration. He was associated with Kin- 
 nersley and Franklin in the " Philadelphia Experiments;" and 
 Franklin said of him : 
 
 44 The power of points to throw off the electrical fire was first 
 communicated to me by my ingenious friend, Mr. Thomas Hop- 
 kinson."* 
 
 * WILSON & FISKE : Cyclopaedia of American Biography, iii, 260. 
 
"20 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 The name of Philip Syng is also mentioned in connection 
 with the Philadelphia experiments, and it would be well if some 
 memorials of his work could be placed upon record. 
 
 William Bartram [b. 1739, d. 1823] was living in the famous 
 botanical garden at Kingsessing, which his father, the old King's 
 botanist, had bequeathed him in 1777. He was for some years 
 professor of botany in the Philadelphia college, and in 1791 
 printed his charming volume descriptive of his travels in Flor- 
 ida, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The latter years of his life 
 appear to have been devoted to quiet observation. William 
 Bartram has been, perhaps, as much underrated as John Bar- 
 tram has been unduly exalted. He was one of the best observ- 
 ers America has ever produced, and his book, which rapidly 
 passed through several editions in English and French, is a 
 classic and should stand beside White's " Selborne " in every 
 naturalist's library. Bartram was doubtless discouraged early 
 in his career by the failure of his patrons in London to make any 
 scientific use of the immense botanical collections made by him in 
 the South before the Revolution, which, many years later, was 
 lying unutilized in the Banksian herbarium. Coues has called 
 attention very emphatically to the merits of his bird work, which 
 he pronounces " the starting-point of a distinctly American 
 school of ornithology." Two of the most eminent of our early 
 zoologists, Wilson and Say, were his pupils ; the latter his kins- 
 man, 'and the former his neighbor, were constantly with him at 
 Kingsessing and drew much of their inspiration from his conver- 
 sation. " Many birds which Wilson first fully described and 
 figured were really named and figured by Bartram in his 
 Travels, and several of his designations were simply adopted 
 by Wilson."* 
 
 Bartram's " Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians "f 
 
 * COUES : Key to North American Birds, p. xvi 
 t Trans. Am. Ethnological Society, iii, 1851. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 21 
 
 was an admirable contribution to ethnography, and his general 
 observations were of the highest value. 
 
 In the introduction to his " Travels," and interspersed through 
 this volume, are reflections which show him to have been the 
 possessor of a very philosophic and original mind. 
 
 His "Anecdotes of an American Crow " and his " Memoirs 
 of John Bartram "* were worthy products of his pen, while his 
 illustrations to Barton's " Elements of Botany " show how 
 facile and truthful was his pencil. 
 
 His love for botany was such, we are told, that he wrote a 
 description of a plant only a few minutes before his death, a 
 statement which will be readily believed by all who know the 
 nature of his enthusiasm. Thus, for instance, he wrote of the 
 Venus's Fly Trap : 
 
 "Admirable are the properties of the extraordinary Dionaea mus- 
 cipula ! See the incarnate lobes expanding ; how gay and sportive 
 they appear ! ready on the spring to entrap incautious, deluded in- 
 sects ! What artifice ! There ! behold one of the leaves just closed 
 upon a struggling fly ; another has gotten a worm ; its hold is sure ; 
 its prey can never escape carnivorous vegetable ! Can we, after 
 viewing this object, hesitate for a moment to confess that vegeta- 
 ble beings are endowed with some sensible faculties or attributes 
 similar to those that dignify animal nature? They are living, or- 
 ganical. and self-moving bodies ; for we see here in this plant 
 motion and volition. "f 
 
 Moses Bartram, a cousin of William, and also a botanist, was 
 also living near Philadelphia, and in 1879 published ^Observa- 
 tions on the Native Silk Worms of North America," and Hum- 
 phrey Marshall [1722-1801], the farmer-botanist, had a botanical 
 garden of his own, and in 1785 published " The American 
 Grove Arbustrium Americanum " a treatise on the forest trees 
 and shrubs of the United States, which was the first strictly 
 
 * Nicholson's Journal, 1805. 
 f Travels, 1793, p. xiv. 
 
22 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 American botanical book, and which was republished in France 
 a few years later in 1789. 
 
 Gotthilf Muhlenberg [b. 1753, d. 1815], a Lutheran clergy- 
 man, living at Lancaster, was an eminent botanist, educated in 
 Germany, though a native of Pennsylvania. His " Flora of Lan- 
 caster" was a pioneer work In 1813 he published a full cata- 
 logue of the Plants of North America, in which about 2,800 
 species were mentioned. He supplied Hedwig with many of the 
 rare American mosses, which were published either in " Stirpes 
 Cryptogamicae " of that author or in the " Species Muscorum." 
 To Sir J. E. Smith and Mr. Dawson Turner he likewise sent 
 many plants. He made extensive preparations, writing a gen- 
 eral flora of North America, but death interfered with his* pro- 
 ject. The American Philosophical Society preserves his her- 
 barium, and the moss Funeria Muhlenbergii, the violet, Viola 
 Muhlcnbergii, and the grass Muhlenbergia, are among the 
 memorials to his name.* 
 
 To Pennsylvania, but not to Philadelphia, came, in 1794, 
 Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the philosopher, theologian, and 
 chemist. Although his name is more famous in the history 
 of chemistry than that of any living contemporary, American 
 or European, his work was nearly finished before he left Eng- 
 land. He never entered into the scientific life of the country 
 which he sought as an exile, and of which he never became 
 a citizen, and he is not properly to be considered an element 
 in the history of American science. 
 
 His coming, however, was an event of considerable political 
 importance; and William Cobbett's " Observations on the Em- 
 igration of Doctor Joseph Priestley. By Peter Porcupine," was 
 followed by several other pamphlets equally vigorous in ex- 
 pression. McMaster is evidently unjust to some of the public 
 
 * HOOKER : On the Botany of America. Edinburgh Journal of Science, 
 iii, p. 103, et seq. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 23 
 
 men who welcomed Priestley to America, though no one will 
 deny that there were unprincipled demagogues in America in 
 the year of grace 1794. Jefferson was undoubtedly sincere when 
 he wrote to him the words quoted elsewhere in this address. 
 
 Another eminent exile, welcomed by Jefferson, and the writer, 
 at the President's request, o" a work on national education in the 
 United States, was M. Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours [b. in 
 Paris, 1799, d. 1817]. He was a member of the Institute of 
 France, a statesman, diplomatist, and political economist, and 
 author of many important works. He lived in the United States 
 at various times, from 1799 to 1817, when he died near 
 Wilmington, Delaware. Like Priestley, he was a member of the 
 American Philosophical Society, and affiliated with its leading 
 members. 
 
 The gunpowder works near Wilmington, Delaware, founded 
 by his son in 1798, are still of great importance, and the statue 
 of one of his grandsons, an Admiral in the U. S. Navy, adorns 
 one of the principal squares in the National Capital. 
 
 Among other notable names on the roll of the society, in the 
 last century, were those of Gen. Anthony Wayne and Thomas 
 Payne. His Excellency General Washington was also an active 
 member, and seems to have taken sufficient interest in the society 
 to nominate for foreign membership the Earl of Buchan, Presi- 
 dent of the Society of Scottish Antiquarians, and Dr. James An- 
 derson, of Scotland. 
 
 The following note written by Washington is published in the 
 Memoirs of Rittenhouse : 
 
 " The President presents his compliments to Mr. Rittenhouse, 
 and thanks him for the attention he has given to the case of Mr. 
 Anderson and the Earl of Buchan. 
 
 " SUNDAY AFTERNOOX, 2otk April* 1794." 
 
 Of all the Philadelphia naturalists of those early days, the one 
 who had the most salutary influence upon the progress of science 
 
24 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 was, perhaps, Benjamin Smith Barton [b. 1766, d. 1815.] 
 Barton was the nephew of Rittenhouse, and the son of the Rev. 
 Thomas Barton, a learned Episcopal Clergyman of Lancaster, 
 who was one of the earliest members of the Philosophical Society, 
 and a man accomplished in science. 
 
 He studied at Edinburgh and Gottingen, and at the age of 19, 
 in 1785, he was the assistant of Rittenhouse and Ellicott, in 
 the work of establishing the western boundary of Pennsylvania, 
 and soon after was sent to Europe, whence, having pursued an 
 extended course of scientific and medical study, he returned in 
 1789, and was elected professor of natural history and botany in 
 the University of Pennsylvania. He was a leader in the Philo- 
 sophical Society, and the founder of the Linna?an Society of 
 Philadelphia, before which, in 1807, he delivered his famous 
 u Discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural His- 
 torv, " which did much to excite an intelligent popular interest 
 in the subject. His essays upon natural history topics were the 
 first of the kind to appear in this country. He belonged to the 
 school of Gilbert White and Benjamin Stillingfleet, and was 
 the first in America of a most useful and interesting group of 
 writers, among whom may be mentioned John D. Godman, 
 Samuel Lockwood, C. C. Abbott, Nicholas Pike, John Bur- 
 roughs, Wilson Flagg, Ernest Ingersoll, the Rev. Dr. McCook, 
 Hamilton Gibson, Maurice Thompson, and W. T. Hornaday, as 
 well as Matthew Jones, Campbell Hardy, Charles Waterton, 
 P. H. Gosse, and Grant Allen, to whom America and England 
 both have claims. 
 
 Barton published certain descriptive papers, as well as manuals 
 of botany and materia medica, but in latter life had become so 
 absorbed in medical affairs that he appears to have taken no 
 interest in the struggles of the infant Academy of Natural Sciences, 
 which was founded three years before his death, but of which he 
 never became a member, 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 25 
 
 His nephew and successor in the Presidency r/ the Linnaean 
 Society and the University Professorship, William P. C. Barton 
 [b. 1786, d. 1856], was a man of similar tendencies, who in 
 early life published papers on the flora of Philadelphia [Florae 
 Philadelphia? Prodromus, 1815], but later devoted himself chiefly 
 to professional affairs, writing copiously upon materia medica and 
 medical botany. 
 
 The admirers of Benjamin Smith Barton have called him "the 
 father of American Natural History," but I cannot see the pro- 
 priety of this designation, which is equally applicable to Mitchill 
 or Jefferson, and perhaps still more so to Peter Collinson, of 
 London. The praises of Barton have been so well and so often 
 sung that I do not feel guilty of injustice in passing him briefly by.* 
 
 The most remarkable naturalist of those days was Rafinesque, 
 [b. 1784, d. 1872], a Sicilian by birth, who came to Philadel- 
 phia in 1802. 
 
 Nearly fifty years ago this man died, friendless and impover- 
 ished, in Philadelphia. His last words were these: ''Time ren- 
 ders justice to all at last." Perhaps the day has not yet come 
 when full justice can be done to the memory of Constantine 
 Rafinesque, but his name seems yearly to grow more prominent 
 in the history of American zoology. He was in many respects 
 the most gifted man who ever stood in our ranks. When in his 
 prime he far surpassed his American contemporaries in versa- 
 tility and comprehensiveness of grasp. He lived a century too 
 soon. His spirit was that of the present period. In the latter 
 years of his life, soured by disappointments, he seemed to become 
 unsettled in mind, but as I read the story of his life his eccen- 
 tricities seem to me the outcome of a boundless enthusiasm for 
 the study of nature. The picturesque events of his life have 
 
 * W. P. C. BARTON: Biography of Benjamin S. Barton, Philadelphia, 
 1815 
 
26 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 boon so well described by Jordan,* Chase,f and Audubonj that 
 they need not be referred to here. The most satisfactory gauge 
 of his abilities is perhaps his masterly " Survey of the Progress 
 and Actual State of Natural Sciences in the United States of 
 America,'" printed in i8i7. His own sorrowful estimate of 
 the outcome of his mournful career is very touching : 
 
 "I have often been discouraged, but have never despaired 
 long. I have lived to serve mankind, but have often met with 
 ungrateful returns. I have tried to enlarge the limits of knowl- 
 edge, but have often met with jealous rivals instead of friends. 
 With a greater fortune I might have imitated Humboldt or 
 Linnaeus." 
 
 Dr. Robert Hare [b. 1781 , d. 1858] began his long career of use- 
 fulness in 1801, at the age of twenty, by the invention of the oxy- 
 hydrogen blow-pipe. This was exhibited at a meeting of the 
 Chemical Society of Philadelphia in i8oi.|| 
 
 This apparatus was perhaps the most remarkable of his orig- 
 inal contributions to science, which he continued without inter- 
 ruption for more than fifty years. It belongs to the end of the 
 post-revolutionary period, and is therefore noticed, although it is 
 not the purpose of this essay to consider in detail the work of 
 the specialists of the present century. 
 
 Dr. Hugh Williamson [b. Dec. 5, 1735, d., in New York, May 
 22, 1719] was a prominent but not particularly useful promoter 
 of science, a writer rather than a thinker. His work has already 
 been referred to. The names of Maclure, who came to Phila- 
 delphia about 1797, the Rev. John Heckewelder, and Albert 
 Gallatin [b. 1761, d. in 1849], a native of Switzerland, a states- 
 man and financier, subsequently identified with the scientific cir- 
 
 * JORDAN : Bulletin xv, U. S. National Museum : Science Sketches, p. 143. 
 t CHASE : Potter's American Monthly, vi, pp. 97-101. 
 I AUDUBON : The Eccentric Naturalist <C Ornithological Biography, 
 P- 455- 
 
 Amer. Monthly Magazine, ii, 81. 
 || Amer. Month. Mag., i, 80. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 27 
 
 cles of New York, complete the list of the Philadelphia savans 
 of the last century. 
 
 There is not in all American literature a passage which illus- 
 trates the peculiar tendencies in the thought of this period so 
 thoroughly as Jefferson's defense of the country against the 
 charges of Buffon and Raynal, which he published in 1783, 
 which is particularly entertaining because of its almost pettish 
 depreciation of our motherland. 
 
 " On doit etre etonne " (says Raynal) " que 1'Amerique n'ait 
 pas encore produit un bon poete, un habile mathematicien, un 
 nomine de genie dans un seul art on un seule science." 
 
 " When we shall have existed a people as long as the Greeks did 
 before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French 
 a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, 
 should this reproach still be true, we will inquire from what 
 unfriendly causes it has proceeded that the other countries of 
 Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any 
 name on the role of poets. 
 
 " In war we have produced a Washington whose name will in 
 future ages assume its just station among the celebrated worthies 
 of the world, when that wretched philosophy shall.be forgotten 
 which would have arranged him among the degeneracies of na- 
 ture. 
 
 * 4 In physics we have produced a Franklin, than whom no one 
 of the present age has made more important discoveries, nor has 
 enriched philosophy with more, or more ingenious, solutions of 
 the phaenomena of nature. 
 
 " We have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer 
 living; that in genius he must be the first because he is self- 
 taught. He has not indeed made a world ; but he has by imita- 
 tion approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived 
 from the creation to this day. There are various ways of keeping 
 the truth out of sight. Mr. Rittenhouse's model of the planetary 
 system has the plagiary appellation of an orrery ; and the quadrant 
 invented by Godfrey, an American also, and with the aid of which 
 the European nations traverse the globe, is called Hadley's quad- 
 rant. 
 
 " We calculate thus : The United States contain three millions 
 of inhabitants ; France twenty millions ; and the British Islands 
 ten. We produce a Washington, a Franklin, a Rittenhouse. 
 France then should have half a dozen in each of these lines, and 
 Great Britain half that number, equally eminent. It may be true 
 
28 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 that France has ; we are but just becoming acquainted with her, 
 and our acquaintance so far gives us high ideas of the genius 
 of her inhabitants. 
 
 " The present war having so long cut off all communications 
 with Great Britain, we are not able to make a fair estimate 
 of the state of science in that country. The spirit in which she 
 wages war is the only sample before our eyes, and that does not 
 seem the legitimate offspring either of science or civilization. 
 The sun of her glory is fast descending to the horizon. Her phi- 
 losophy has crossed the channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and 
 herself seems bearing to that awful dissolution whose issue is not 
 given human forethought to scan."* 
 
 This was one phase of public sentiment. Another, no less 
 instructive, is that shown forth in the publications of Jefferson's 
 fierce political opponents in 1790, paraphrased, as follows, by 
 McMaster in his " History of the People of the United States :" 
 
 " Why, it was asked, should a philosopher be made President? 
 Is not the active, anxious, and responsible station of Executive illy 
 suited to the calm, retired, and exploring tastes of a natural phi- 
 losopher? Ability to impale butterflies and contrive turn-about 
 chairs may entitle one to a college professorship, but it no more 
 constitutes a claim to the Presidency than the genius of Cox, the 
 great bridge-builder, or the feats of Ricketts, the equestrian. Do 
 not the pages of history teem with evidence of the ignorance and 
 mismanagement of philosophical politicians? John Locke was a 
 philosopher, and framed a constitution for the colony of Georgia, 
 but so full was it of whimsies that it had to be thrown aside. 
 Condorcet, in 1793, made a constitution for France, but it con- 
 tained more absurdities than were ever before piled up in a system 
 of government, and was not even tried. Rittenhouse was another 
 philosopher; but the only proof he gave of political talents was 
 suffering himself to be wheedled into the presidency of the Demo- 
 cratic Society of Philadelphia. But suppose that the title of phi- 
 losopher is a good claim to the Presidency, what claim has Thomas 
 Jefferson to the title of philosopher? Why, forsooth ! 
 
 " He has refuted Moses, dishonored the story of the Deluge, 
 made a penal code, drawn up a report in weights and measures, 
 and speculated profoundly on the primary causes of the difference 
 between the whites and blacks. Think of such a man as Presi- 
 dent ! Think of a foreign minister surprising him in the act of 
 anatomizing the kidneys and glands of an African to find out why 
 the negro is black and odoriferous ! 
 
 * Notes on Virginia, 1788, pp. 69-71. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 29 
 
 u He has denied that shells found on the mountain tops are parts 
 of the great flood. He has declared that if the contents of the 
 whole atmosphere were water, the land would only be overflowed 
 to the depth of fifty-two and a half feet. He does not believe 
 the Indians emigrated from Asia. 
 
 ; Every mail from the South brought accounts of rumblings and 
 quakes in the Alleghanies, and strange lights and blazing meteors 
 in the sky. These disturbances in the natural world might have 
 no connection with the troubles in the political world ; neverthe- 
 less it was impossible not to compare them with the prodigies all 
 writers of the day declare preceded the fatal Ides of March." 
 
 X. 
 
 In New York, although a flourishing medical school had been 
 in existence from 1769, there was an astonishing dearth of natu- 
 ralists until about 1790. Governor Golden, the botanist and 
 ethnologist, had died in 1776, and the principal medical men 
 of the city, the Bards, Glossy, Jones, Middleton. Dyckman, 
 and others, confined their attention entirely to professional 
 studies. A Philosophical Society was born in 1787, but died 
 before it could speak. A Society for the Promotion of Agri- 
 culture, Arts, and Manufactures, organized in 1791, was more 
 successful, but not in the least scientific. Up to the end of 
 the century New York State had but six men chosen to mem- 
 bership in the American Philosophical Society, and, up to 1809, 
 but five in the American Academy. Leaders, however, soon 
 arose in Mitchill, Clinton, and Hosack. 
 
 Samuel Latham Mitchill, the son of a Quaker farmer [b. 1764. 
 d. 1831], was educated in the medical schools of New York 
 and Edinburgh, and in 1792 was appointed Professor of Chem- 
 istry, Natural History, and Philosophy in Columbia College. 
 Although during most of his long life a medical professor and 
 editor, and for many years representative and senator in Congress, 
 he continued active in the interests of general science. He made 
 many contributions to systematic natural history, notably a His- 
 tory of the Fishes of New York, and his edition of Bewick's 
 
30 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 " General History of Quadrupeds," published in New York in 
 1804, with notes and additions, and some figures of American 
 animals, was the earliest American work of the kind. He was the 
 first in America to lecture upon geology, and published several 
 papers upon this science. His " Mineralogical Exploration of 
 the banks of the Hudson River" in 1796, under the " Society 
 for the Promotion of Agriculture, Manufactures, and Useful 
 Arts," founded by himself, was our earliest attempt at this 
 kind of research, and in 1794 he published an essay on the 
 "Nomenclature of the New Chemistry," the first American 
 paper on chemical philosophy, and engaged in a controversy 
 with Priestley, in defence of the nomenclature of Lavoisier, 
 which he was the first American to adopt. 
 
 His discourse on " The Botanical History of North and South 
 America" was also a pioneer effort. He was an early leader 
 in ethnological inquiries and a vigorous writer on political topics. 
 His " Life of Tammany, the Indian Chief" (New York, 1795), 
 is a classic, and he was well known to our grandfathers as the 
 author of " An Address to the Fredes or People of the United 
 States," in which he proposed that " Fredonia" should be adopted 
 as the name of the nation. 
 
 Dr. Mitchill was a poet,* and a humorist, and a member of the 
 literary circles of his day. In "The Croakers" Rodman Drake 
 thus addressed him as " The Surgeon General of New York :" 
 
 " It matters not how high or low it is 
 Thou knowest each hill and vale of knowledge, 
 Fellow of forty-nine societies 
 And lecturer in Hosack's College." 
 
 Fitz-Greene Halleck also paid his compliments in the following 
 terms : 
 
 "Time was when Dr. Mitchill's word was law, 
 When Monkeys, Monsters, Whales and Esquimaux, 
 Asked but a letter from his ready hand, 
 To be the theme and wonder of the land." 
 
 * Examples of his verses may be found in Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of 
 American Literature. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 31 
 
 These and other pleasantries, of which many are quoted in 
 Fairchild's admirable u History of the New York Academy of 
 Sciences," gives us an idea of the provinciality of New York 
 sixty years ago, when every citizen would seem to have known 
 the principal local representatives of science, and to have felt a 
 sense of personal proprietorship in him and in his projects. 
 
 Mitchill was a leader in the New York Historical Society ; 
 founder of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and of its 
 successor, the Lyceum of Natural History, of which he was long 
 president. He was also President of the New York Branch of 
 the Linnaean Society of Paris, and of the N. Y. State Medical 
 Society, and Surgeon-General of the State Militia; a man of the 
 widest influence and universally beloved. He served four terms 
 in the House of Representatives, and was five years a member 
 of the U. S. Senate.* 
 
 DeWitt Clinton [b. 1769, d. 1828], statesman and philan- 
 thropist, U. S. Senator, and Governor of New York, was a 
 man of similar tastes and capacities. What Benjamin Frank- 
 lin was to Philadelphia in the middle of the eighteenth century 
 DeWitt Clinton was to New York in the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth. He was the author of the Hibernicus " Letters on 
 the Natural History and Internal Resources of the State of New 
 York" (New York, 1822), a work of originality and merit. As 
 President of the Literary and Philosophical Society he delivered 
 in 1814 an u Introductory Discourse," which, like Barton's in 
 
 * See FRANCIS, JOHN W. Life of Dr. Mitchill, in Williams's American 
 Medical Biography, pp. 401-411, and eulogy in Discourse in Commemora- 
 tion of 53d Anniversary of N. Y. Hist. Soc., 1857, 56-60; and in his Old 
 New York; also 
 
 Sketch by H. L. Fairchild in History of the New York Academy of Sci- 
 ences, 1887, pp. 57-67; also Dr. Mitchill's own pamphlet: Some of the 
 Memorable Events and Occurrences in the Life of Samuel S. Mitchill, of 
 New York, from the year 1786 to 1827. 
 
 A biography by Akerly was in existence, but has never been printed. 
 
 Numerous portraits are in existence, which are described by Fairchild. 
 
32 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Philadelphia, ten years before, was productive of great good. It 
 was, moreover, laden with the results of original and important 
 observations in all departments of natural history. Another im- 
 portant paper was his " Memoirs on the Antiquities of Western 
 New York " printed in 1818. 
 
 Clinton's attention was devoted chiefly to public affairs, and 
 especially to the organization of the admirable school system of 
 New York and other internal improvements. He did enough in 
 science, however, to place him in the highest ranks of our early 
 naturalists.* 
 
 Hosack has been referred to elsewhere as a pioneer in miner- 
 alogy and the founder of the first botanic garden. He was long 
 president of the Historical Society, and exercised a commanding 
 influence in every direction. His researches were, however, 
 chiefly medical. 
 
 Samuel Akerly [b. 1785, d. 1845], the brother-in-law of 
 Mitchill, a graduate of Columbia College, 1807, was an in- 
 dustrious worker in zoology and botany and the author of the 
 " Geology of the Hudson River." John Griscom [b. 1774, d. 
 1852], one of the earliest teachers of chemistry, began in 1806 a 
 career of great usefulness. " For thirty years," wrote Francis, 
 44 he was the acknowledged head of all other teachers of chem- 
 istry among us (in New York), and he kept pace with the flood 
 of light which Davy, Murray, Gaylussac, and Thenard, and 
 others shed on the progress of chemical philosophy at that day." 
 About 1820 he went abroad to study scientific institutions, and his 
 charming book, 'A Year in Europe,' supplemented by his regu- 
 lar contributions to Sillimart's Journal, commenting on scientific 
 affairs in other countries, did much to stimulate the growth of 
 scientific and educational institutions in America. 
 
 * HOSACK : Memoirs of DeWitt Clinton. New York, 1829. RENWICK : 
 Life of DeWitt Clinton. New York, 1840. CAMPBELL : Life and Writings 
 of DeWitt Clinton. New York, 1849. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 33 
 
 Francis tells us that he was for thirty years the acknowledged 
 head of the teachers of chemistry in New York.* 
 
 A zealous promoter of zoology in those days was F. Adrian 
 Vanderkemp, of Oldenbarnavelt, New York, who in 1795, we 
 are told, delivered an address before an Agricultural Society in 
 Whitesburg, N. Y., in which he offered premiums for essays 
 upon certain subjects, among which was one " for the best ana- 
 tomical and historical account of the moose, fifty dollars, or for 
 bringing one in alive, sixty dollars."! 
 
 Having mentioned several American naturalists of foreign 
 birth, it may not be out of place to refer to the American origin 
 of an English zoologist of high repute, Dr. Thomas Horsfield, 
 born in Philadelphia in 1773, and after many years in the East 
 became, in 1820, a resident of London, where he died in 1859. 
 His name is prominent among those of the entomologists, bota- 
 nists, and ornithologists of this century, especially in connection 
 with Java. 
 
 XI. 
 
 In New England, science was more highly appreciated than in 
 New York. Massachusetts had in John Adams a man who, like 
 Franklin and Jefferson, realized that scientific institutions were 
 the best protection for a democratic government, and to his efforts 
 America owes its second scientific society the American Acad- 
 emy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780. When Mr. Adams 
 travelled from Boston to Philadelphia, in the days just before 
 the Revolution, he several times visited at Norwalk, we are told, 
 a curious collection of American birds and insects made by Mr. 
 Arnold. "This was afterwards sold to Sir Ashton Lever, in 
 whose apartments in London Mr. Adams saw it again, and felt 
 i new regret at our imperfect knowledge of the productions of 
 
 * GRISCOM, JOHN H.: Memoir of John Griscom. New York, 1859. 
 t DeWitt Clinton, in Trans. Lt. Phil. Soc. N. Y., p. 59. 
 
34 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHItfGTOK 
 
 the three kingdoms of nature in our land. In France his visits 
 to the museums and other establishments, with the inquiries of 
 Academicians and other men of science and letters respecting 
 this country, and their encomiums on the Philosophical Society 
 of Philadelphia, suggested to him the idea of engaging his native 
 State to do something in the same good but neglected cause."* 
 
 The Academy, from the first, was devoted chiefly to the physi- 
 cal sciences, and the papers in its memoirs for the most part 
 relate to astronomy and meteorology. 
 
 Among its early members I find the names of but two natural- 
 ists : The Rev. Manasseh Cutler, pastor of Ipswich Hamlet, one 
 of the earliest botanists of New England,! and William Dan- 
 dridge Peck [b. 1763, d. 1882], the author of the first paper on 
 systematic zoology ever published in America, a " Description 
 of four remarkable fishes, taken near the Piscataqua in New 
 Hampshire," published in 1794^ Peck, after graduating at 
 Harvard, lived at Kittery, N. H., and first became interested in 
 natural history by reading a wave-worn copy of Linnets " Sys- 
 tem of Nature," which he obtained from the ship which was 
 wrecked near his house. He became a good entomologist, and 
 communicated much valuable material to Kirby in England, and 
 was also one of our first writers on the fungi. He was the first 
 to occupy the chair of natural history in Harvard University, to 
 which he was appointed in 1800. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Jedediah Morse [b. 1761, grad. Yale, 1783, 
 d. 1826] was the earliest of American geographers, and appears, 
 especially in the later gazetteers published by him, to have printed 
 important facts concerning the number and geographical distribu- 
 tion of the various Indian tribes. 
 
 The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded 
 
 *KIRTLAND: Mem. Amer. Acad. New Series, vol. i, p. xxii. 
 
 t See previous address, p. 95. 
 
 J Mem. Amer. Acad. Sci., ii, Part ii, p. 46. 1797. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 35 
 
 in 1799, one of the chief promoters being President Dwight 
 [b. 1752, d. 1817], whose "Travels in New England and 
 New York," printed in 1821, abounds with scientific observations. 
 
 Another was E. C. Herrick [b. 1811, d. 1862], for many 
 years librarian and subsequently treasurer of Yale College, 
 whose observations upon the aurora, made in the latter years of 
 the last century, are still frequently quoted ; and later an active 
 investigator of volcanic phenomena, and the author of a treatise 
 on the Hessian fly and its parasites, the results of nine years' 
 study ; and of another on the existence of a planet between 
 Mercury and the sun. 
 
 Benjamin Silliman [b. in Trumbull, Conn., Aug. 8, 1779, d. 
 in New Haven, Nov. 27, 1869], who, in 1802, became Professor 
 of Chemistry at Yale, began there his career of usefulness as 
 an organizer, teacher, and critic. One of his introductions to 
 popular favor was the paper which he, in conjunction with 
 Prof. Kingsley, published, "An account of the meteor which 
 burst over Weston, in Connecticut, in December, 1807." This 
 paper attracted attention everywhere, for the nature of meteors 
 was not well understood in those days. Jefferson was reputed to 
 have said in reference to it, " that it was easier to believe that 
 two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could 
 fall from heaven ;" but I think this must be pigeon-holed with 
 the millions of other slanders to which Jefferson was subjected 
 in those days. I find in the papers by Rittenhouse and Madison, 
 published twenty years before, by the Philosophical Society, 
 matter-of-fact allusions to the falling of meteors to the earth. 
 
 Silliman was the earliest of American scientific lecturers who 
 appeared before popular audiences, and, as founder and editor of 
 the Journal of Science, did a service to science, the value of 
 which is beyond estimate or computation. 
 
 Benjamin Waterhouse, Professor of the Theory and Practice 
 of Medicine in Harvard, 1783-1812, was one of the earliest 
 
36 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 teachers of natural botany in America, and the author of a poem 
 entitled " The Botanist." * The Rev. Jeremy Belknap [b. 1744, 
 d. 1798], in his " History of New Hampshire," and the Rev. 
 Samuel Williams [b. 1743, d. 1817], in his ''Natural and Civil 
 History of Vermont, "f made contributions to local natural his- 
 tory, and Capt. Jonathan Carver [b. 1732, d. 1780], in his 
 " Travels through the Interior Parts of America,'"' { gave some 
 meagre information as to the zoology and botany of regions 
 previously unknown. v 
 
 In the South the prestige of colonial days seemed to have de- 
 parted. Except Jefferson, the 'only naturalist in Virginia was 
 Dr. James Greenway, of Dinwiddie Co., a, botanist of some 
 merit. Mitchell returned to England before the Revolution, and 
 Garden followed in 1784. H. B. Latrobe, of Baltimore, was 
 an amateur ichthyologist, and Dr. James MacBride, of Pine- 
 ville, S. C. [b. 1784, d. 1817], was an active botanist. Dr. 
 Lionel Chalmers [b. 1715? d. Z 777]> wno was f r many years 
 the leader of scientific activity in South Carolina, was omitted 
 in the previous address. A graduate of Edinburgh, he was for 
 forty years a physician in Charleston. He recorded observations 
 on meteorology from 1750 to 1760, the foundation of his " Trea- 
 tise on the Weather and Diseases of South Carolina " [London, 
 1776], and published also valuable papers on pathology. He 
 was the host and patron of many naturalists, such as the Bar- 
 trams. 
 
 There was no lack of men in the South who were capable of 
 appreciating scientific work. Virginia had fourteen members 
 in the American Philosophical Society from 1780 to 1800, while 
 Massachusetts and New York had only six each, the Carolinas 
 had eight, and Maryland six. The population of the South 
 was, however, widely dispersed and no concentration of effort 
 
 * Biography in Polyanthus, vol. ii. 
 f Walpole, N. H., 1794, 8vo, p. 416. 
 t 1778. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 37 
 
 was possible. To this was due, no doubt, the speedy dissolu- 
 tion of the Academy of Arts and Sciences founded in Richmond 
 in 1788.* 
 
 A name which should, perhaps, be mentioned in connection 
 with this is that of Dr. William Charles Wells, whom it has 
 been the fashion of late to claim as an American. It would 
 be gratifying to be able to vindicate this claim, for Wells was 
 a man of whom any nation might be proud. He was the orig- 
 inator of the generally-accepted theory of the origin of dew, and 
 was also, as Darwin has shown, the first to recognize and an- 
 nounce the theory of evolution by natural selection. f Unfor- 
 tunately Wells's science was not American science. We might 
 with equal propriety claim as American the art of James 
 Whistler, the politics of Parnell, the fiction of Alexandre 
 Dumas, the essays of Grant Allen, or the science of Rumford 
 and Le Vaillant. 
 
 Wells was the son of an English painter, who emigrated, in 
 1753, to South Carolina, where he remained until the time of 
 the Revolution, when, with other loyalists, he returned to 
 England. He was born during his father's residence in Charles- 
 ton, but left the country in his minority ; was educated at Edin- 
 burgh, and though he, as a young physician, spent four years in 
 the United States, he was permanently established in London 
 practice fully twenty-eight years before he read his famous letter 
 before the Royal Society. 
 
 The first American naturalist who held definite views as to 
 evolution was, undoubtedly, Rafinesque. In a letter to Dr. 
 Torrey, Dec. i, 1832, he wrote: 
 
 " The truth is that species, and perhaps genera also, are form- 
 ing in organized beings by gradual deviations of shapes, forms, 
 and organs taking place in the lapse of time. There is a tendency 
 
 * See previous discourse, p. 98. 
 
 t DARWIN: Origin of species, 6th Amer. Ed., p xv. MORSE: Proc. 
 Amer. Assoc. Adv. Science, xxv, p. 141. 
 
38 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 to deviation and mutation in plants and animals by gradual steps, 
 at remote, irregular periods. This is a part of the great universal 
 law of perpetual mutability in everything." 
 
 It is pleasant to remember that both Darwin and Wallace 
 owed much of their insight into the processes of nature to their 
 American explorations. It is also interesting to recall the clos- 
 ing lines, almost prophetic as they seem to-day, of the "Epistle 
 to the Author of the Botanic Garden,"* written in 1798 by 
 Elihu Hubbard Smith, of New York, and prefixed to the Amer- 
 ican editions of " The Botanic Garden :" 
 
 " Where Mississippi's turbid waters glide 
 And white Missouri pours its rapid tide; 
 Where vast Superior spreads its inland sea 
 And the pale tribes near icy empires sway; 
 Where now Alaska lifts its forests rude 
 And Nootka rolls her solitary flood. 
 Hence keen incitement prompt the prying mind 
 By treacherous fears, nor palsied nor confined; 
 Its curious search embrace the sea and shore 
 And mine and ocean, earth and air explore. 
 
 " Thus shall the years proceed, till growing time 
 Unfold the treasures of each different clime; 
 Till one vast brotherhood mankind unite 
 In equal bonds of knowledge and of right; 
 Thus the proud column, to the smiling skies 
 In simple majesty sublime shall rise, 
 O'er ignorance foiled, their triumph loud proclaim, 
 And bear inscribed, immortal, DARWIN'S name." 
 
 XII. 
 
 During the three decades which made up the post-revolution- 
 ary period there were several " beginnings " which may not 
 well be referred to in connection with individuals or localities. 
 
 The first book upon American insects was published in 1797, 
 a sumptuously-illustrated work, in two volumes, with 104 col- 
 ored plates, entitled " The Natural History of the rarer Lepi- 
 dopterous Insects of Georgia." This was compiled by Sir 
 James E. Smith from the notes and drawings of John Abbot 
 
 * Erasmus, grandfather of Charles Darwin. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 39 
 
 [b. about 1760], living in England in 1840, an accomplished 
 collector and artist, who had been for several years a resident 
 of Georgia, gathering insects for sale in Europe. Mr. Scudder 
 characterizes him as " the most prominent student of the life his- 
 tories of insects we have ever had."* 
 
 There had, however, been creditable work previously done in 
 what our entomologists are pleased to call the biological side of 
 the science. As early as 1768, Col. Landon Carter, of " Sabine 
 Hall/' Virginia, prepared an elaborate paper u On the Habits of 
 the Fly-Weevil that destroys the Wheat/' which was printed by 
 the American Philosophical Society ,| accompanied by an ex- 
 tended report by " The Committee of Husbandry." In the same 
 year Moses Bartram presented his " Observations on the native 
 Silk-Worms of North America. "J 
 
 Organized effort in economic entomology appears to date from 
 the year 1792, when the American Philosophical Society ap- 
 pointed a committee to collect materials for a natural history of 
 the Hessian Fly, at that time making frightful ravages in the 
 wheat-fields, and so much dreaded in Great Britain that the 
 import of wheat from the United States was forbidden by law. 
 The Philosophical Society's committee was composed of Thomas 
 Jefferson, at that time Secretary of State in President Washing- 
 ton's cabinet, Benjamin Smith Barton, James Hutchinson, and 
 Caspar Wistar. In their report, which was accompanied by 
 large drawings, the history of the little marauder was given in 
 considerable detail. 
 
 The publication of Wilson's American Ornithology, begin- 
 ning in 1808, was an event of great importance. It was in 1804 
 
 * There is a whole series of quarto or folio volumes in the British Mu- 
 seum done by him, and a few volumes are extant in this country. Be- 
 sides, all the biological material, in Smith- Abbot's Insects of Georgia is 
 his." Letter of S. H. Scudder. 
 
 t Transactions of the American Philosophical Soc., i, 274. 
 
 I Ibid., p. 294. 
 
40 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 that the author, a schoolmaster near Philadelphia, decided upon 
 his plan. In a letter to Lawson he wrote : 
 
 " I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a 
 Collection of all the Birds of North America. Now, I don't 
 want you to throw cold water on this notice, Quixotic as it may 
 appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of Airy 
 Castles and brain Windmills that it has become one of my com- 
 forts of life, a sort of rough Bone, that amuses me when sated 
 with the dull drudgery of Life." 
 
 I need not eulogize Wilson. Every one knows how well he 
 succeeded. He has had learned commentators and elo- 
 quent biographers. Our children pore over the narrative of 
 the adventurous life of the weaver naturalist, and we all are 
 sensible of the charms which his graceful pen has given to the 
 life-histories of the birds. 
 
 His poetical productions are immortal, and his lines to the 
 Blue Bird and the Fisherman's Hymn are worthy to stand by 
 the side of Bryant's Waterfowl, Trowbridge's Wood Pevvee, 
 Emerson's Titmouse, Thaxter's Sandpiper, and, possibly best 
 of all, Walt. Whitman's Mocking-Bird in " Out of the Cradle 
 endlessly Rocking." 
 
 Ichthyology in America dates also from these last years of 
 the century. Garden was our only resident ichthyologist until 
 Peck and Mitchill began their work, but Schoepf, the Hessian 
 military surgeon, printed a paper on the Fishes of New York 
 in 1 787 , and William Bryant, of New Jersey, and Henry Col- 
 lins Flagg, of South Carolina, made observations upon the elec- 
 tric eel, in addition to those which Williamson, of North Car- 
 olina, laid before the Royal Society in 1775. 
 
 Paleontology had its beginning at about the same time in the 
 publication of Jefferson's paper on the Megalonyx or "Great 
 Claw" in 1797.* 
 
 * The first vertebrate fossils were found in Virginia. Samuel Maverick, 
 of Massachusetts, reported to the colony at Boston in 1836 that, at a place 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 41 
 
 This early study of a fossil vertebrate was followed 2O years 
 later by the first paper which touched upon invertebrates that 
 by Say on "-Fossil Zoology," in the first volume of Silliman's 
 Journal. Lesueur seems to have brought from France some 
 knowledge of the names of fossils, and identified many species 
 for the early American geologists. 
 
 Stratigraphical and physical geology also came in at this time, 
 and will be referred to later. 
 
 The science of mineralogy was brought to America in its 
 infancy. The first course of lectures upon this subject ever 
 given in London was in the winter of 1793-4, by Schmeisser, 
 u pupil of Werner. Dr. David Hosack, then a student of 
 medicine at Edinburgh, was one of his hearers, and inspired by 
 his enthusiasm began at once to form the collection of minerals 
 which he brought to America on his return in 1794, which was 
 the first mineralogical cabinet ever seen on this side of the 
 Atlantic. This collection was exhibited for many years in New 
 York (and in 1821 was given to Princeton College). Howard 
 soon after obtained a select cabinet from Europe, and the 
 museum of the American Philosophical Society acquired the 
 Smith collection. In 1802, Mr. B. D. Perkins, a New York 
 bookseller, brought from London a fine collection, which soon 
 passed into the possession of Yale College, and in 1803 Dr. Arch- 
 ibald Bruce brought over one equally fine, \\hich was made the 
 basis of lectures when in 1806 he became -professor of miner- 
 alogy in Columbia College. George Gibbs, in 1805, imported 
 the magnificent collection which was long in the custody of the 
 American Geological Society. Seybert, about the same time, 
 brought to Philadelphia the cabinet which in 1813 was bought 
 by the Academy of Natural Sciences and was lectured upon by 
 Troost in 1814. 
 
 on the James River, about sixty miles above its mouth, the colonists had 
 found shells and bones, among these bones that of a whale, eighteen feet 
 below the surface. Neill's Virginia Carolorum, p. 131. 
 
42 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Much of the early botanical exploration was, however, carried 
 out by European botanists : Andre Michaux [b. near Versailles, 
 1746, d. Madagascar, 1802], a pupil of the Jussiens and an ex- 
 perienced explorer, was sent by this government, in 1785, to 
 collect useful trees and shrubs for naturalization in France. He 
 remained eleven years ; made extensive explorations in the 
 regions then accessible, and as far west as the Mississippi ; sent 
 home immense numbers of living plants ; and, after his return, 
 in 1796, published his treatise on the American Oaks,* and pre- 
 pared the materials for his posthumous u Flora Boreali-Ameri- 
 canas." 
 
 Fran9ois Andre Michaux [b. near Versailles, 1770, d. at 
 Vaureal, 1855] was his father's assistant in these early travels, 
 and in 1802 and 1806 himself made botanical explorations in the 
 Mississippi Valley. His botanical works were of great impor- 
 tance, t especially that known in its English translation as the 
 " North American Sylva," afterward completed by Nuttall, and 
 still the only work of the kind, though soon to be supplemented, 
 we hope, by Professor Sargent's projected monographs. 
 
 Frederick Pursh [b. 1774, in Tobolsk, Siberia, d. June n, 
 1820, in Montreal, Canada] carried on botanical explorations 
 between 1799 and 1819; living, from 1802 to 1805, in Philadel- 
 phia, and from 1807 to 1810 in New York. In 1814 he pub- 
 lished in London his " Flora Americae Septemtrionalis." Pursh' s 
 Flora was largely based upon the labors of the American bot- 
 anists Barton, Hosack, LeConte, Peck, Clayton, Walter, and 
 Lyon, and the botanical collection of Lewis and Clarke, and 
 enumerated about 3,000 species of plants, while Michaux's, 
 printed eleven years before, had only about half that number. 
 
 A. von Enslen collected plants at this time, in the South and 
 West, for the Imperial Cabinet in Vienna. C. C. Robin, who 
 
 * Histoire des che'nes de PAmerique Septentrionale, 1801 ; 36 plates, 
 f Voyage a Pouest des monte Alleghany, &c. 8vo, pp. 684. Paris, 1808, 
 Jlistoire des arbres fbre*stieres de PAmerique, Septentrionale. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 43 
 
 travelled from 1802 to 1806 in what are now the Gulf States, 
 wrote a botanical appendix to his Travels, published in 1807, on 
 which Rafinesque founded his " Florula Ludoviciana " (New 
 York, 1817). 
 
 Thaddeus Haenke [b. 1761, d. in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1817] 
 visited Western North America with the Spaniards late in the 
 last century, and made large collections of plants, which were 
 sent to the National Museum of Bohemia, at Prague, and in 
 part described in Presl's " Reliquiae Haenkianae," 72 plates. 
 
 Archibald Menzies [b. 1754, d. 1842], an English naval sur- 
 geon,' also collected on our Pacific coast, under Vancouver, in 
 1780-95, and his plants found their way to Edinburgh and Kew. 
 
 Captain Wangenheim, Surgeon Schoepf, of the Hessian 
 contingent of the British army, Olaf Swartz, a Swedish botan- 
 ical explorer, and others, also gathered plants in these early days, 
 and, in some instances, published in Europe their botanical 
 observations. 
 
 Other collectors of this same class were L. A. G. Bosc [i759~ 
 1828], who made botanical researches in the Carolinas during 
 the last two years of the century, and returned to France in 1800 
 with a herbarium of 1,600 species. He also collected fishes, 
 and his name is perpetuated in connection with at least two 
 well-known American fauna. Another was M. Milbert, who 
 collected for Cuvier in New York, Canada, the Great Lake 
 region, and the Mississippi Valley from 1817 to 1823. 
 
 The Baron Palisot de Beauvois [b. 1755, d. 1820] came from 
 Santo Domingo to America in 1791. He travelled extensively, 
 and being a zoologist as well as a botanist, made observations 
 upon our native animals, particularly the reptiles. 
 
 It is to him that we owe the most carefully recorded of 
 existing observations of young rattlesnakes crawling down their 
 parent snakes' throats for protection from enemies. 
 
 Most of these men did not contribute largely to the advance- 
 
44 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 ment of American scientific institutes or affiliate with the natu- 
 ralists of the day. 
 
 Of quite another type was the Count Luigi Castiglioni, who 
 travelled, soon after the Revolution, throughout the Eastern 
 States, and published in 1790 two volumes of his travels.* 
 
 The Count Volney [b. at Craon Feb. 3, 1757, d. in Paris 
 April 25, 1820], traveller, statesman, and historian, travelled 
 in this country from 1795 to 1798, and in 1803, while a Senator 
 of the French Republic, published his famous work upon the 
 United States, containing his observations upon its soil and its 
 climate, and upon the Indians, -together with the first doctrines 
 of the language of the Miamis,| and also giving a description 
 of the physical and botanical features of the country. Volney 
 was an admirer and intimate friend of Franklin, and it was in his 
 home atPassy, we are told, that he conceived the idea of his most 
 famous book " Les Ruines."j 
 
 Among the traditions of Fauquier county, Virginia, is one 
 which is of interest to naturalists, since it relates to an incident 
 showing the interest of our first President in science : 
 
 "About the year 1796," runs the story, " at the close of a long 
 summer's day, a stranger entered the village of Warrenton. He 
 was alone, and on foot, and his appearance was anything but 
 prepossessing. His garments, coarse and dust-covered, indicated 
 an individual in the humble walks. From a cane across his 
 shoulders was suspended a handkerchief containing his clothing. 
 Stopping in front of Turner's tavern, he took from his hat a paper 
 and handed it to a gentleman standing on the steps ; it read as 
 follows : 
 
 " The celebrated historian and naturalist 
 VOLNEY needs no recommendation from 
 
 " G. WASHINGTON." 
 
 * Viaggio negli Stati Uniti del America Settentrionali. 
 
 t Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis d'Amerique, suivi d'eclair- 
 cissements sur la Floride, sur la colonie frar^aise a Scioto sur quelques 
 colonies canadiennes, et sur les savages. Paris, 1803. 8vo, 2 vols. 2d 
 edition. Paris. Svo, i vol., pp. 494. Map. 
 
 J BIGELOW, JOHN : Franklin's Home and Host, in France. The Century, 
 May, 1888, p. 743. 
 
PBESIDENTIA.L ADDRESS. 45 
 
 In 1801 Jefferson began his eight years of presidency. Since he 
 was the only man of science who has ever occupied the chief magis- 
 tracy, he has a right to a high place in the esteem of such a society 
 as ours, and I only regret that, having spoken of him at length 
 a year ago, I cannot now discuss his scientific career in all its 
 aspects. 
 
 I then spoke of the credit which was due to him for beginning 
 so early as 1 780 to agitate the idea of a government exploring 
 expedition to the Pacific, which culminated in the sending out 
 by Congress of the expedition of Lewis and Clarke, in 1803. 
 Captain Lewis [b. 1774, d. 1809], the leader of this expedition, 
 was a young Virginian, the neighbor, and for some years the 
 private secretary, of President Jefferson. He set out in the sum- 
 mer of 1803, accompanied by his associate, Captain Clarke, and 
 twenty-eight men. They entered the Missouri, May 14, 1804, 
 before the middle of the following July had reached the great 
 falls, and by October were upon the western slope, where, em- 
 barking in canoes upon the Kouskousky, a branch of the Colum- 
 bia, they descended to its mouth, where they arrived on the i5th 
 of November, 1805. The following spring they retraced their 
 course, arriving at St. Louis in September.* The results of the 
 expedition were first made known in Jefferson's message to Con- 
 gress, read February 19, 1806. ' 
 
 The statue of Meriwether Lewis is one of those at the base 
 of the Washington Monument in Richmond, Virginia, and is 
 worthy of the man and his career. 
 
 Dr. Asa Gray in a recent letter says : 
 
 " I have reason to think that Michaux suggested to Jefferson 
 the expedition which the latter was active in sending over to the 
 Pacific. I wonder if he put off Michaux for the sake of having 
 it in American hands? "f 
 
 The idea of an expedition to the Pacific was one which was likely 
 
 * See a complete bibliography of the various reports of this expedition, 
 by Elliott Coues, in the Bulletin of the U. S. Geological Survey. 
 t See Amer. Journ. Sci. , xii, No. i. 
 
46 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 to occur to any thoughtful American, and was, after all, simply 
 the continuing of a plan as old as the Spanish days of discovery. 
 Jefferson, at all events, was an active promoter of all such enter- 
 prises, and after a quarter of a century's effort the expedition was 
 dispatched, while in 1805 Gen. Z. M. Pike was sent to explore 
 the sources of the Mississippi river and the western parts of 
 " Louisiana," penetrating as far west as " Pike's Peak," a name 
 which still remains as a memento of this enterprise. 
 
 The organization of these early expeditions marked the begin- 
 ning of one of the most important portions of the scientific work 
 of our government the investigation of the resources and 
 natural history of the public domain. The expeditions of Lewis 
 and Clarke, and of Pike, were the precursors and prototypes of 
 the magnificent organization now accomplishing so much for 
 science under the charge of Major J. W. Powell. 
 
 As early as 1806, Jefferson, inspired by Patterson and Hassler, 
 urged the establishment of a national Coast Survey, and in this 
 was earnestly supported by his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert 
 Gallatin, who drew up a learned and elaborate project for its 
 organization, and an act authorizing its establishment was passed 
 in 1807. During his administration, in 1802, the first scientific 
 school in this country was established, the Military Academy at 
 West Point. The Military Academy was a favorite project of 
 General Washington, who is said to have justified his anxiety for 
 its establishment by the remark that " an army of asses led by a 
 lion is vastly superior to an army of lions led by an ass." 
 
 Jefferson has been heartily abused for not gratifying Alexander 
 Wilson's request to be appointed naturalist to Pike's expeditions. 
 It is possible that even in those days administrators were ham- 
 pered by lack of financial resources. It must also be remem- 
 bered that in 1804 Wilson was simply an enthusiastic projector, 
 of ornithological undertakings, and had done nothing whatever 
 to establish his reputation as an investigator. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 47 
 
 One of Jefferson's first official acts was to throw his presidential 
 mantle over Priestley. Two weeks after he became President of 
 the United States he wrote these words : 
 
 'It is with heartfelt satisfaction that, in the first moments of 
 my public action, I can hail you with welcome to our hind, 
 tender to you the homage of its respect and esteem, cover you 
 under the protection of those laws which were made for the wise 
 and good like you, and disclaim the legitimacy of that libel on 
 legislators which, under the form of a law, was for some time 
 placed among them." 
 
 * * * " Yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind, 
 and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. 
 Bigots may be an exception. What an effort, my clear sir, of 
 bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through. * * * 
 All advances in science were prescribed as innovations. They 
 pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the 
 education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not 
 forwards for improvement ; the President (Washington) himself 
 declaring in one of his answers to addresses that we were never 
 to expect to go beyond them in real science. This was the real 
 ground of all the attacks on you ; those who live by mystery and 
 charlatanerie fearing you would render them useless by simpli- 
 fying the Christian philosophy, the most sublime and benevo- 
 lent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man, en- 
 deavored to crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame."* 
 
 XIII. 
 
 With the close of the third decade ended the first third of a 
 century since the Declaration of Independence. We have now 
 passed in review a considerable number of illustrious names and 
 have noted the inception of many worthy undertakings. 
 
 " Still, however," in the words of Silliman, " although indi- 
 viduals were enlightened, no serious impression was produced 
 on the public mind ; a few lights were, indeed, held out, but 
 they were lights twinkling in an almost impervious gloom. "f 
 
 This was a state of affairs not peculiar to America. A gloom 
 no less oppressive had long obscured the intellectual atmosphere 
 
 "Jefferson's Works (T. J. Randolph ed.)> 1830, iii, 461. 
 t Silliman, i, 37. 
 
48 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 of the old world. There were a goodly number of men of 
 science, and many important discoveries were being made, but 
 no bonds had yet been formed to connect the interests of the men 
 of science and the men of affairs. 
 
 Speculative science, in the nature of things, can only interest 
 and attract scholarly men. and though its results, concisely and 
 attractively stated, may have a passing interest to a certain por- 
 tion of every community, it is only by its practical applications 
 that it secures the hearty support of the community at large. 
 
 Huxley, in his recent discourse upon " The Advance of Science 
 in the Last Half Century,"* has touched upon this subject in a 
 most suggestive and instructive manner, and has shown that Bacon, 
 with all his wisdom, exerted little direct beneficial influence upon 
 the advancement of natural knowledge, which has after all been 
 chiefly forwarded by men like Galileo and Harvey, Boyle and 
 Newton, "who would have done their work quite as well if 
 neither Bacon nor Descartes had ever propounded their views 
 respecting the manner in which scientific investigation should be 
 pursued." 
 
 I think we should look upon Bacon as the prophet of modern 
 scientific thought, rather than its founder. It is no doubt true, 
 as Huxley has said, that his " scientific insight " was not sufficient 
 to enable him to shape the future course of scientific philosophy, 
 but it is scarcely true that he attached any undue value to the 
 practical advantages which the world as a whole, and incident- 
 ally science itself, were to reap from the applications of scientific 
 methods to the investigation of nature. 
 
 Even though the investigations of Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, 
 Boyle, Torricelli, and Malpighi, had directly helped no man to 
 either wealth or comfort, the cumulative results of their labors, 
 and those of their pupils and associates, resulted in a condition 
 
 * WOOD, T. H. : The Reign of Victoria; a survey of Fifty Years of Pro- 
 gress. London, 1887. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 49 
 
 of scientific knowledge from which, sooner or later, utilitarian 
 results must necessarily have sprung. 
 
 It is true, as Huxley tells us, that at the beginning of this cen- 
 tury weaving and spinning were still carried on with the old 
 appliances ; true that nobody could travel faster by sea or by land 
 than at any previous time in the world's history, and true that 
 King George could send a message from London to York no 
 faster than King John might have done. Metals were still 
 worked from their ores by immemorial rule of thumb, and the 
 centre of the iron trade of these islands was among the oak for- 
 ests of Sussex, while the utmost skill of the British mechanic did 
 not get beyond the production of a coarse watch. 
 
 It cannot be denied that although the middle of the eighteenth 
 century was illuminated by a host of great names in science, 
 chemists, biologists, geologists, English, French, German, and 
 Italian, the deepening and broadening of natural knowledge had 
 produced next to no immediate practical benefits. Still I cannot 
 believe that Bacon, the prophet, would have been so devoid of 
 scientific insight " as to have failed to foresee at this time the 
 
 o 
 
 ultimate results of all this intellectual activity. 
 But Huxley says : 
 
 fc> Even if, at this time, Francis Bacon could have returned to 
 the scene of his greatness and of his littleness, he must have re- 
 garded the philosophic world which praised and disregarded his 
 precepts with great disfavor. If ghosts are consistent, he would 
 have said, " these people are all wasting their time, just as Gil- 
 bert, and Kepler, and Galileo, and my worthy physician Harvey 
 did in my day. VVhere are the fruits of the restoration of science 
 which I promised? This accumulation of bare knowledge is all 
 very well, but ctii bono? Not one of these people is doing what I 
 told him specially to do, and seeking that secret of the cause of 
 forms, which will enable him to deal at will with matter and 
 superinduce new nature upon old foundations." 
 
 As Huxley, however, proceeds himself to show, in the dis- 
 cussion which immediately follows this passage, a " new nature, 
 
50 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 begotten by science upon fact," has been born within the past 
 few decades, and pressing itself daily and hourly upon our atten- 
 tion, has worked miracles which have not only modified the whole 
 future of the lives of mankind, but has reacted constantly upon 
 the progress of science itself. 
 
 It is to the development of this new nature, then in its very 
 infancy, that we must look for the revival of interest in science 
 on this side of the Atlantic. 
 
 The second decade of the century was marked by a great 
 accession of interest in the sciences. The second war with 
 Great Britain having ended, the country, for the first time since 
 colonial days, became sufficiently tranquil for peaceful attention 
 to literature and philosophy. The end of the Napoleonic wars 
 and the restoration of tranquillity to Europe tended to scientific 
 advances on the other side of the Atlantic, and the results of the 
 labors of Cuvier, whose glory was now approaching its zenith, 
 of Brongniart, of Blainville, of Jussieu, of Decandolle, of Werner, 
 of Hutton, of Buckland, of De la Beche, of Magendie, of Hum- 
 boldt, Daubuisson, Berzelius, Von Buch, of Herschel, of Laplace, 
 of Young, of Fresnel, of Oersted, of Cavendish, of Lavoisier, Wol- 
 laston, Davy, and Sir William Hooker, were eagerly welcomed 
 by hundreds in America. 
 
 "In truth," wrote one who was among the most active in 
 promoting these tendencies, " in truth, a thirst for the Natural 
 vSciences seemed already to pervade the United States like the 
 progress of an epidemic." 
 
 The author of these enthusiastic words was Amos Eaton 
 [b. in Chatham, N. Y., 1776, d. May 6, 1842], one of the most 
 interesting men of his day. In 1816, at the age of fortv, he 
 abandoned the practice of law and went to New Haven to 
 attend Silliman's lectures on Mineralogy and Geology. He was 
 a man of great force and untiring energy, and one of the pio- 
 neers of American geology ; though the name, " father of Amer- 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 51 
 
 ican geology," sometimes applied to him, would seem to belong 
 more appropriately to Maclure, or, perhaps, to Mitchill. He- 
 was, however, only some eight years later than Maclure in 
 beginning geological field-work. Eaton's " Index to the Geology 
 of the Northern States of America," printed in 1817, was the first 
 strictly American treatise, and seems to have had a very stimu- 
 lating effect. He was pre-eminently an agitator and an educator. 
 He travelled many thousands of miles on foot throughout New 
 England and New York, delivering, in the meantime, at the 
 principal towns, short courses of lectures on natural history. 
 In March, 1817, having received an invitation to aid in the intro- 
 duction of the Natural Sciences in Williams College, his Alma 
 Mater, he delivered a course of lectures in Williamstown. 
 <k Such," he remarks, " was the zeal at this institution that an 
 uncontrollable enthusiasm for natural history took possession of 
 every mind ; and other departments of learning were, for a time, 
 crowded out of the college. The authorities allowed twelve 
 students each day (seventy-two per week) to devote their whole 
 time to the collection of minerals and plants, in lieu of all other 
 exercises."* 
 
 In April, 1818, he wen* to Albany on the special invitation 
 of Gov. DeWitt Qinton and delivered a course of lectures on 
 Natural History. " In Albany I found," wrote he, " Dr. T. 
 Romeyn Beck, and in Troy, Doctors Burrett, Robbins, and 
 Dale, zealous beyond description in the cause of Natural Science. 
 By the exertions of these gentlemen a taste for the study of 
 Nature was strongly excited in those two cities, especially for 
 that of geology. They, together with several others, had become 
 members of the New York Lyceum of Natural History, and, in 
 the fall of 1818, established a society of the same name and 
 upon a similar plan in Troy. Collections were made with 
 such zeal that, in the course of a few months, Troy could boa i >t 
 
 * Geological Text-Book, 2d ed., 1832, p. 16. 
 
52 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 of a more extensive collection of American geological specimens 
 than Yale College, or any other institution upon this continent."* 
 
 " In this period," remarked Bache, u the prosecution of mathe- 
 matics and physical science was neglected ; indeed barely kept 
 alive by the calls for boundary and land surveys of the more ex- 
 tended class, by the exertions necessary in the lecture-room, or by 
 isolated volunteer efforts. 
 
 "As the country was explored and settled the unworked mine 
 of natural history was laid open, and the attention of almost all 
 the cultivators of science was turned toward the development of 
 its riches. 
 
 " Descriptive natural history is the pursuit which emphatically 
 made that period. As its experiment may be taken the admira- 
 ble descriptive mineralogy of Cleaveland, which seemed to fill the 
 measures of that day and be, as it were, its chief embodiment, 
 appearing just as the era was passing away."f 
 
 The leading spirits of the day seem to have been Si Hi man, 
 Hare, Maclure, Mitchill, Gibbs, Cleaveland, DeWitt Clinton, 
 and Caspar Wistar. 
 
 Names familiar to us of the present generation began now to 
 appear in scientific literature : Isaac* Lea began to print his 
 memoirs on the Unionidcz ; Edward Hitchcock, principal of the 
 Deerfield Academy, was writing his first papers on the geology 
 of Massachusetts ; Prof. Chester Dewey, of Williams College, 
 [b. 1781, d. 1867], afterwards known to us all from his excellent 
 work upon the Carices, was discussing the mineralogy and geol- 
 ogy of Massachusetts ; Dr. John Torrey, also to be famous as a 
 botanist, was then devoting his attention to mineralogy and 
 
 * The Troy Lyceum of Natural History was incorporated in [819, and a 
 lectureship was created, filled by Mr. Eaton (Stlliman's Journal, ii, 173). 
 In 1820 a similar association, " The Hudson Association for Improvement 
 in Science," was founded in the city of Hudson, and in 1821 the Delaware 
 Chemical and Geological Society. 
 
 t Presidential Address Am. Assoc. Adv. Sci., 1851, pp. vi, xlvi. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 53 
 
 chemistry ; Dr. Jacob Porter was making botanical observations 
 in central Massachusetts ; quaint old Caleb Atwater, at that time 
 almost the only scientific observer west of the Alleghanies, was 
 discussing the origin of prairies, meteorology, botanv, geology, 
 mineralogy, and scenery of the Ohio country, and a little later 
 the remains of mammoths. 
 
 Prof. J. W. Webster, of Boston, was making general studies 
 in geology ; the Rev. Elias Cornelius and Mr. John Grammar 
 were writing of the geology of Virginia ; Mr. J. A. Kain, upon 
 that of Tennessee, I. P. Brace, that of Connecticut, and James 
 Pierce, that of New Jersey. 
 
 To this period belonged the brilliant Constantine Rafinesque, 
 with Torrey, Silliman, Cleaveland, Gibbs, James, Schoolcraft, 
 Gage, Akerly, Mitchill, Dana, Beck, and Featherstonhaugh. 
 
 Dr. Henry R. Schoolcraft, afterwards prominent in ethnology, 
 printed, in 1819, his "View of the Lead Mines of Missouri," 
 the first from American contributors to economic geology ; and 
 in the same year his ik Transallegania," a mineralogical poem, 
 probably the last as well as the first of its kind written in 
 America. In 1821 he published a scholarly "Account of the 
 Native Copper on the Southern shore of Lake Superior."* 
 
 Mineralogy and geology were the most popular of the sciences. 
 American Geology dated its beginning from this previous 
 decade. Prof. S. L. Mitchill was one of the first to call 
 attention to the teachings of Kirwan and the pioneers of Eu- 
 ropean geology, and very early in the century began to 
 instruct the students of Columbia College in the principles 
 of geology as then understood. He published Observations 
 on the Geology of America, and also edited a New York edition 
 of Cuvier's " History of the Earth," contributing to this work 
 an appendix which was constantly quoted by early writers. 
 
 The first geological explorer was William Maclure [b. in Ayr, 
 
 *Amer. Jour. Science, iii, pp. 201-210. 
 
54 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Scotland, 1763, d. in San Angel, Mexico, Mar. 23, 1840], a 
 Scotch merchant who amassed a large fortune by commercial 
 connections with this country, and became a citizen of the United 
 States about 1796. His most important service to American 
 science was that of a patron, for he was a liberal supporter of the 
 infant Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, and for twenty-two 
 years its president, besides being an upholder of other important 
 enterprises. 
 
 The publication in 1809 of his "Observations on the Geology 
 of the United States" marks the beginning of American geo- 
 graphical geology and the first attempt at a geological survey of 
 the United States. This had long been the object of his ambi- 
 tion, and, in order to prepare himself for the task, he had spent 
 several years in travel throughout Europe, making observations 
 and collecting objects in natural history, which he forwarded to 
 the country of his adoption. 
 
 His undertaking was undoubtedly a remarkable one. u He 
 went forth with his hammer in his hand and his wallet on his 
 shoulder, pursuing his researches in every direction, visiting 
 almost every State aud Territory, wandering often amidst path- 
 less tracts and dreary solitudes until he had crossed and re- 
 crossed the Alleghany mountains not less than fifty times. He 
 encountered all the privations of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and ex- 
 posure, month after month and year after year, until his indom- 
 itable spirit had conquered every difficulty and crowned his 
 enterprise with success,"* and after the publication of his me- 
 moir he devoted eight years more to collecting materials for a 
 second and revised addition. 
 
 The geological map of the United States, published in 1809, 
 appears to have been the first of the kind ever attempted for an 
 entire country. Smith's geological map of England was six 
 years later, and Greenough's still subsequent in date. 
 
 * MARTIN: Memoir of William Maclure, p. n. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 55 
 
 The publication in London in 1813 of Bakewell's " Introduc- 
 tion to Geology " seems to have given a great stimulus to geo- 
 logical researches in this country, as may be judged from the 
 publication of an American edition a yearor two later. 
 
 Mitchill, Bruce, and Maclure soon had a goodly band of asso- 
 ciates. Naturalists were not confined to limited specialties in 
 those days, and we find all the chemists, botanists, and zoolo- 
 gists absorbed in the consideration of geological problems. 
 Maclure and most of the Americans were disciples of Werner. 
 
 Silliman, writing in 1818, said: 
 
 "A grand outline has recently been drawn by Mr. Maclure 
 with a masterly hand and with a vast extent of personal obser- 
 vation and labour ; but, to fill up the detail, both observation and 
 labour still more extensive are demanded ; nor can the object be 
 effected till more good geologists are formed and distributed over 
 our extensive territory." 
 
 On the 6th of September, 1819, the American Geological 
 Society was organized in the philosophical room of Yale Col- 
 lege, an event of great importance in the history of science, 
 hastening, as it seems to have done, the establishment of State 
 surveys and stimulating observation throughout the countrv. 
 This Society, which continued in existence until about 1826, 
 may fairly be considered the nucleus of the Association of Ameri- 
 can Geologists and Naturalists, and, consequently, of the Ameri- 
 can Association for the Advancement of Science. Members 
 appended to their names the symbols, M. A. G. S., and it was 
 for a time the most active of American scientific societies. 
 
 The characteristics of the leading spirits were summed up by 
 .Eaton at the time of its beginning : 
 
 " The President, William Maclure, has already struck out the 
 grand outline of North American geographical geology. The 
 first Vice-President, Col. G. Gibbs, has collected more facts and 
 amassed more geological and mineralogical specimens than any 
 other individual of the age. The second Vice-President, Pro- 
 fessor Silliman, gives the true scientific dress to all the naked 
 
56 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 mineralogical subjects which are furnished to his hand. The 
 third Vice-President, Professor Cleaveland, is successfully em- 
 ployed in elucidating and familiarizing those interesting scenes ; 
 and thus smoothing the rugged paths of the student. Professor 
 Mitchill has amassed a large store of materials and annexed them 
 tq the labors of Cuvier and Jameson. The drudgery of climbing 
 cliffs and descending into fissures and caverns, and of traversing 
 in all directions our most rugged mountainous districts, to ascer- 
 tain the distinctive characters, number, and order of our strata, 
 has devolved upon me."* 
 
 Eaton has very fairly defined his own position among the early 
 geologists, which was that of an explorer and pioneer. The epi- 
 thet, " Father of American Geology," which has sometimes been 
 applied to him, might more justly be bestowed upon Maclure, or 
 even upon Mitchill. The name of Amos Eaton [b. 1776, cl. 
 1872] will always be memorable, on account of his connection 
 with the geological survey of New York, which was begun in 
 1820, at the private expense of Hon. Stephen Van Rensselaer ; 
 also as the founder, in 1824, of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti- 
 tute, the first of its class on the continent. 
 
 The State of New York was not pre-eminently prompt in 
 establishing an official survey, but the liberality of Van Rensse- 
 laer and the energy of Eaton gave to New York the honor of 
 attaching the names of its towns and counties to a large num- 
 ber of the geological formations of North America. 
 
 In these early surveys Eaton was associated with Dr. Theo- 
 dore Romeyn Beck and Mr. H. Webster, naturalist and collec- 
 tor, one of the first being a survey of the county of Albany, un- 
 der the special direction of a County Agricultural Society, fol- 
 lowed by similar surveys of Rensselaer county and Saratoga 
 county and others along the Erie Canal. 
 
 In July, 1818, Professor Silliman began the publication of the 
 American Journal of Science, which has been for more than 
 two-thirds of a century the most prominent register of the scien- 
 
 * Index to the Geology of the Northern States, ad ed. 1820. p. viii. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 57 
 
 tific progress of this continent. Silliman's journal succeeded, 
 and far more than replaced, the American Mineralogical Jour- 
 nal, the earliest of American scientific periodicals, which was 
 established in New York 1810 by Dr. Archibald Bruce, and 
 which was discontinued after the close of the first volume, in 
 1814, on account of the illness and untimely death of its pro- 
 jector.* The Mineralogical Journal was not so limited- in 
 scope as in name, and was for a time the principal organ of 
 our scientific specialists. f 
 
 We can but admire the spirit of Silliman, who remarks in the 
 preface to the third volume : 
 
 " It must require several years from the commencement of the 
 work to decide the question [whether it is to be supported] , and 
 the editor (if God continues his life and health) will endeavour 
 to prove himself neither impatient nor querulous during the time 
 that his countrymen hold the question undecided, whether there 
 shall be an American Journal of Science and Arts" 
 
 In the fall of 1822 he announced that a trial of four years had 
 decided the point that the American public would support this 
 journal. 
 
 Prior to the establishing of Silliman's journal, the principal 
 organs of American science were the Medical Repository, 
 commenced in 1798, of which Dr. Mitchill was the chief 
 proprietor ; the New York Medical and Physical Journal, 
 conducted chiefly by Dr. Hosack ; the Boston Journal of Phi- 
 losophy and the Arts, and other similar periodicals. Our 
 students looked chiefly, however, to the English journals 
 Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine and Nicholson's Journal of 
 Natural Philosophy, and later, Thomson's Annals of Phil- 
 osophy, the Annales de Chimie. 
 
 * " No future historian of American science will fail to commemorate 
 this work us our earliest purely scientific journal, supported by original 
 American communications" said Silliman in his prospectus, 1817. 
 
 fThe only copies of this journal known to be in existence are in the N. 
 Y. State Library and the Harvard Library. 
 
58 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 The American Monthly Magazine, established in 1814 by 
 Charles Brockden Brown, was fully as much devoted to science 
 as to literature, and an examination of this and other journals 
 of the early portion of the century will, I think, satisfy the student 
 that scientific subjects were more seriously considered by our 
 ancestors than by the Americans of to-day. The American 
 Monthly published elaborate reviews of technical works, such as 
 Cleaveland's Mineralogy, and summaries of the world's progress 
 in science, as well as the monthly proceedings of all the scientific 
 societies in New York, and papers on systematic zoology and 
 botany by Rafinesque. 
 
 In 1812 the American Antiquarian Society was established at 
 Worcester, and before 1820, when its first volume of transactions 
 appeared, had collected 6,000 books and "a respectable cabinet." 
 This was a pioneer effort in ethnological science. Archceologia 
 Americana contained papers by Mitch ill, Atwater, and others, 
 chiefly relating to the aboriginal population of America. The 
 name of Isaiah Thomas, LL. D. [b. in Boston 1749, d. in Wor- 
 cester 1831], the founder and first president of the society, who 
 at his own expense erected a building for its accommodation and 
 endowed its first researches, should be remembered with grati- 
 tude by American naturalists. He was one of the most eminent 
 of American printers, and styled by DeWarville " the Didot of 
 America." 
 
 In 1812 the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 
 was founded, the outgrowth of a social club, whose members, 
 we are told, had no conception of the importance of the work 
 they were undertaking when, in a spirit of burlesque, they 
 assumed the title of an academy of learning. 
 
 In 1816 the Coast Survey, after years of discussion, was placed 
 in action under the supervision of Hassler (who had been ap- 
 pointed its head as early as 1811), but, two years later, the work 
 oing on too slowly to please the Government, it was stopped, 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 59 
 
 The Linnaaan Society of New England, established in Boston 
 about this time, was the precursor of the Boston Society of 
 Natural Science. 
 
 The publication of an American edition of Rees's Cyclopaedia, 
 in Philadelphia, was begun in 1810, and the 47*h volume com- 
 pleted in 1824. This was an event in the history of American 
 science, for it furnished employment and thus fostered the inves- 
 tigations of several eminent naturalists, among whom were Alex- 
 ander Wilson, Thomas Say, and Ord ; while, at the same time, it 
 fostered a taste for science in the United States and gave currency 
 to several rather epoch-making articles, such as Say's upon 
 Conchology and Entomology. 
 
 Mr. Bradbury, the publisher of this Cyclopaedia, was the first 
 of a goodly company of liberal and far-seeing publishers who 
 have done much for science in this country by their patronage of 
 important scientific publications. 
 
 In 1817 Josiah Meigs, Commissioner of the Land Office, issued 
 a circular to the several Registers of the Land Offices of the 
 United States requiring them to keep daily meteorological obser- 
 vations, and also to report upon such phenomena as the times of 
 the unfolding of leaves of plants and the dates of flowering, the 
 migrations of birds and fishes, the dates of spawning of fishes, 
 the hibernation of animals, the history of locusts and other in- 
 sects in large numbers, the falling of stones and other bodies from 
 the atmosphere, the direction of meteors, and discoveries rela- 
 tive to the antiquities of the country. 
 
 It does not appear that anything ever resulted from this step, 
 but it is referred to as an indication that, seventy years ago, our 
 Government was willing to use its civil service officials in the 
 interest of science. A few years later the same idea was carried 
 into effect by the Smithsonian Institution. 
 
 In those early days each of the principal cities had public mu- 
 seums founded and supported by private enterprise. Their pro- 
 
60 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 prietors were men of scientific tastes, who affiliated with the nat- 
 uralists of the day and placed their collections freely at the dis- 
 posal of investigators. 
 
 The earliest was the Philadelphia Museum, established by 
 Charles Wilson Peale, and for a time housed in the building of 
 the American Philosophical Society. In 1800 it was ful.l of pop- 
 ular attractions. 
 
 " There were a mammoth's tooth from the Ohio, and a woman's 
 shoe from Canton ; nests of the kind used to make soup of, and a 
 Chinese fan six feet long; bits of asbestos, belts of wampum, 
 stuffed birds and feathers from the Friendly Islands, scalps, tom- 
 ahawks, and long lines of portraits of great men of the Revolu- 
 tionary War. To visit the Museum, to wander through the rooms, 
 play upon the organ, examine the rude electrical machine, and 
 have a profile drawn by the physiognomitian, were pleasures 
 from which no stranger to the city ever refrained." 
 
 Dr. Hare's oxyhydrogen blow-pipe was shown in this Museum 
 by Mr. Rubens Peale as early as 1810. 
 
 The Baltimore Museum was managed by Rembrandt Peale, 
 and was in existence as early as 1815 and as late as 1830.* 
 
 Earlier efforts were made, however, in Philadelphia. Dr. 
 Chovet, of that city, had a. collection of wax anatomical models 
 made by him in Europe, and Prof. John Morgan, of the Univer- 
 sity of Pennsylvania, who learned his methods from the Hunters 
 in London and Su in Paris, was also forming such a collection 
 before the Revolution. f 
 
 The Columbian Museum and TurrelFs Museum, in Boston, 
 are spoken of in the annals of the day, and there was a small 
 collection in the attic of the State House in Hartford. 
 
 * " Baltimore has a handsome museum superintended by one of the 
 Peale family, well known for their devotion to natural science and to 
 works of art. It is not their fault if the specimens which they are enabled 
 to display in the latter department are very inferior to their splendid ex- 
 hibitions in the former." MRS. TROLLOPE, Domestic Manners of the 
 Americans. London, 1831. 
 
 t Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., ii, p. 366. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 61 
 
 The Western Museum, in Cincinnati, was founded about 1815, 
 by Robert Best, M. D., afterwards of Lexington, Ky., who seems 
 to have been a capable collector, and who contributed matter to 
 Godman's " American Natural History." In 1818 a society styled 
 the Western Museum Society was organized among the citizens, 
 which, though scarcely a scientific organization, seems to have 
 t-iken a somewhat liberal and public-spirited view of what a mu- 
 seum should be. To the naturalist of to-day there is something 
 refreshing in such simple appeals as the following : 
 
 u In collecting the fishes and reptiles of the Ohio the managers 
 will need all the aid which their fellow-citizens may feel disposed 
 to give them. Although not a very interesting department of 
 zoology, no object of the Society offers so great a prospect of 
 novelty as that which embraces these animals. 
 
 " The obscure and neglected race of insects will not be over- 
 looked, and any specimen sufficiently perfect to be introduced 
 into a cabinet of entomology will be thankfully received."* 
 
 Major John Eatton LeConte, U. S. A. [b. 1784, d. 1860], was 
 a very successful student of botany and zoology. He published 
 many botanical papers and contributions to descriptive zoology, 
 and also in Paris, in conjunction with Boisduval, the first 
 instalment of a work, of which he was really sole author, upon the 
 Lepidoptera of North America. f 
 
 The elder brother, Dr. Lewis LeConte [b. 1782, d. 1838], 
 was equally eminent as an observer, and was, for forty years, one 
 of the most prominent naturalists in the South. On hfs planta- 
 tion in Liberty county, Ga., he established a botanical garden 
 and a chemical laboratory. His zoological manuscripts were de- 
 stroyed in the burning of Columbia just at the close of the civil 
 war, but his observations, which he was averse to publishing in 
 his own name, were, we are told, embodied in the writings of his 
 
 *An Address to the people of the Western Country, dated Cincinnati, 
 Sept. 15, 1818, and signed by Elijah Slack, James Findlay, William Steele, 
 Jesse Embrees, and Daniel Drake, Managers. 
 
 t Histoire Generate et Iconographie. 
 
62 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 brother, of Stephen Elliott, of the Scotch botanist Gordon,* of 
 Dr. William Baldwin, and others. f J 
 
 Stephen Elliott, of Charleston, South Carolina [b. 1711, d. 
 1830], was a graduate of Yale in the class of 1791, and, while 
 prominent in the political and financial circles of his State, found 
 time to cultivate science. He founded in 1813 the Literary and 
 Philosophical Society of South Carolina, and was its first presi- 
 dent ; and in 1829 was elected Professor of Natural History and 
 Botany in the South Carolina Medical College, which he aided 
 to establish. He published " The Botany of South Carolina and 
 Georgia" (Charleston, 182127), having been assisted in its 
 preparation by Dr. James McBride ; and had an extensive 
 museum of his own gathering. The Elliott Society of Natural 
 History, founded in 1853, or before, and subsequently con- 
 tinued under the name of the Elliott Society of Science and 
 Art, 1859-75? was named in memory of this public-spirited 
 man. 
 
 Jacob Green [b. 1790, d. 1841], at different times professor 
 in the College of New Jersey and in Jefferson Medical College, 
 was one of the old school naturalists, equally at home in all 
 of the sciences His paper on Trilobites (1832) was our first 
 formal contribution to invertebrate paleontology ; his "-Account of 
 some new species of Salamanders, " one of the earliest steps in 
 American herpetology ; his " Remarks on the Unios of the United 
 States, "|| the beginning of studies subsequently extensively prose- 
 cuted by Lea and some other entomologists. He also wrote upon 
 the crystallization of snow, and was the author of " Chemical 
 
 * London's Gardeners' Magazine. 
 
 t A. H. Stephens in Johnson's Cyclopcedia, p. 1702. 
 
 \ The LeConte family deserves a place in Galto's "Hereditary Ge- 
 nius." Prof. John LeConte, the physicist, and Prof. Joseph LeConte, 
 the geologist, were sons of Dr. Lewis LeConte ; while Dr. J. L. LeConte 
 is the son of his brother, Major LeConte. 
 
 Contributions of the Maclurian Lyceum, i, Jan., 1827, p. 3. 
 
 11 Ibid, i, ii, 41. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 63 
 
 Philosophy," ''Astronomical Researches," and a work upon 
 Botany of the United States. 
 
 The earlier volumes of Silliman's Journal were filled with notes 
 of his observations in all departments of natural history. 
 
 Jose Francisco Correa da Serra, secretary of the Royal 
 Academy of Lisbon, was resident in Philadelphia in 1813, in the 
 capacity of Portuguese minister, and affiliated with our men of 
 science in botanical and geological interests. In 1814 he lectured 
 on botany in the place of B. S. Barton, and also published sev- 
 eral botanical papers, as well as one upon the soil of Kentucky. 
 
 Alire RafFenau Delile, formerly a member of Napoleon's 
 scientific expedition to Egypt, and the editor of the " Flora of 
 Egypt," was in New York about this time, for the purpose of 
 completing his medical education, and seems to have done much 
 to stimulate interest in botanical studies. 
 
 To this as well as to the subsequent period belonged Dr. 
 Gerard Troost [b. in Holland, Mar. 15, 1776, ed. at Ley den, d. 
 at Nashville, Aug. 17, 1850], a naturalist of Dutch birth and edu- 
 cation, who came to Philadelphia in 1810, and was a founder 
 and the first President of the Philadelphia Academy. In 1826 
 he founded a Geological Survey of the environs of Philadelphia ; 
 in 1827 became Professor of Chemistry, Mineralogy and Ge- 
 ology in the University of Nashville. As State geologist of 
 Tennessee from 1831-49 he published some of the earliest State 
 geological reports. 
 
 Another expedition, well worthy of mention, though not ex- 
 ceedingly fruitful, was one made under the direction of Mr. 
 Maclure, President of the Philadelphia Academy, to the Sea 
 Islands of Georgia and the Florida peninsula. The party con- 
 sisted of Maclure, Say, Ord, and Titian R. Peale, and its re- 
 sults, though not embodied in a formal report, may be detected 
 in the scientific literature of the succeeding years. This was 
 early in 1818, while Florida was still under the dominion of 
 
64 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Spain, and the expedition was finally abandoned, owing to the 
 hostile attitude of the Seminole Indians in that territory. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 The third decade of the century, beginning with 1820, was 
 marked by a continuation of the activities of that which pre- 
 ceedcd. In 1826 there were in existence twenty-five scientific 
 societies, more than half of them especially devoted to natural 
 history,* and nearly all of very recent origin. 
 
 The leading spirits were Mitchill, Maclure, Webster, Torrey, 
 Silliman, Gibbs, LeConte,. Dewey, Hare, Hitchcock, Olmstead, 
 Eliot, and T. R. Beck. 
 
 Nathaniel Bowditch [b. 1773, d. 1838], who, in 1829, began 
 the publication of his magnificent translation of the "Mecanique 
 Celeste" of La Place, with those scholarly commentations which 
 secured him so lofty a place among the mathematicians of the 
 world. 
 
 Still more important was the lesson of his noble devotion of 
 his life and fortune to science. The greater part of his monu- 
 mental work was completed, we are told, in 1817, but he found 
 that to print it would cost $12,000, a sum far beyond his means. 
 A few years later, however, he began its publication from his 
 own limited means, and the work was continued, after his death, 
 by his wife. The dedication is to his wife, and tells us that 
 u without her approbation the work would not have been under- 
 taken." 
 
 Another person was W.. C. Redfield [b. 1789, d. 1857], who, 
 in 1827, promulgated the essential portions of the theory of 
 storms, which is now pretty generally accepted, and which was 
 subsequently extended by Sir William Reid in Barbadoes and 
 Bermuda, and greatly modified by Professor Loomis, of New 
 Haven. An eloquent eulogy of Redfield was pronounced by 
 
 * Amer. Journ. Sci., x, p. 368. (Cut). 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 65 
 
 Professor Denison Olmsted at the Montreal meeting of the Ameri- 
 can Association in 1857.* 
 
 Among the rising young investigators appear the names of 
 Joseph Henry, A. D. Bache, C. U. Shepard, the younger Silli- 
 man, Henry Seybert, William Mather, Ebenezer Emmons, 
 Percival, the poet geologist, DeKay, Godman, and Harlan. 
 
 The organization, in 1824, of the Rensselaer School, after- 
 wards the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Troy, marked the 
 beginning of a new era in scientific and technological education. 
 Its principal professors were Amos Eaton and Dr. Lewis C. 
 Beck. 
 
 In 1820 an expedition was sent by the General Government 
 to explore the Northwestern Territory, especially the region 
 around the Great Lakes and the sources of the Mississippi. This 
 was under charge of Gen. Lewis Cass, at that time Governor of 
 Michigan Territory. Henry R. Schoolcraft accompanied this 
 expedition as mineralogist, and Capt. D. B. Douglass, U. S. A., 
 as topographical engineer ; and both of these sent home consider- 
 able collections reported upon by the specialists of the day. Cass 
 himself, though better known as a statesman, was a man of scien- 
 tific tastes and ability, and his " Inquiries respecting the History, 
 Traditions, Languages, &c., of the Indians," published at Detroit 
 in 1823, is a work of high merit. 
 
 Long's expeditions into the far West were also in progress at 
 this time, under the direction of the General Government ; the 
 first, or Rocky Mountain, exploration in 1819-20; the second to 
 the sources of the St. Peter's, in 1823. In the first expedition 
 Major Long was accompanied by Edwin James as botanist and 
 geologist, who also wrote the Narrative published in 1823. The 
 second expedition was accompanied by William H. Keating, 
 Professor of Mineralogy and Chemistry in the University of 
 Pennsylvania, who was its geologist and historiographer. Say 
 
 * See History of N. Y. Academy of Science, p. 76. 
 
66 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 was the zoologist of both explorations. De Schweinitz worked 
 up the botanical material which he collected. 
 
 The English expeditions sent to Arctic North America under 
 the command of Sir John Franklin were also out during these 
 years, the first from 1819 to 1822, the second from 1825 to 1827, 
 and yielded many important results. To naturalists they have 
 an especial interest, because Sir John Richardson, who accom- 
 panied Franklin as surgeon and naturalist, was one of the most 
 eminent and successful zoological explorers of the century, and 
 had more to do with the development of our natural history than 
 any other man not an American. 
 
 His natural history papers in Franklin's reports, 1823 and 
 1828, his k ' Fauna Boreali Americana," published between 1827 
 and 1836, his report upon the "Zoology of North America," are 
 all among the classics of our zoological literature.* 
 
 The third decade was somewhat marked by a renewal of in- 
 terest in zoology and botany, which had, during the few preced- 
 ing years, been rather overshadowed by geology and mineralogy. 
 
 Rafinesque had retired to Kentucky, where, from his profes- 
 sor's chair in Transylvania University, he was issuing his An- 
 nals of Nature and his Wester??. Minerva; and his brilliancy 
 being dimmed by distance, other students of animals had a 
 chance to work. 
 
 One of the most noteworthy of the workers was Thomas Say 
 [b. 17875 d- T 34]? who was a pioneer in several departments of 
 systematic zoology. A kinsman of the Bartrams, he spent many 
 of his boyhood days in the old botanic garden at Kingsessing, 
 in company with the old naturalist, William Bartram, and the 
 ornithologist Wilson. At the age of twenty-five, having been 
 unsuccessful as an apothecary, he gave his whole time to 
 zoology. He slept in the hall of the Academv of Natural 
 
 * See REV. JOHN MC!LWRAITH'S Life of Sir John Richardson, C. B., 
 LL. D. London, 1868. Also Obituary in London Reader, 1865, p. 707. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 67 
 
 Sciences, where he made his bed beneath the skeleton of a 
 horse, and fed himself upon bread and milk. He was wont, we 
 are told, to regard eating as an inconvenient interruption to sci- 
 entific pursuits, and to wish that he had been created with a hole 
 in his side, through which his food might be introduced into his 
 system. He built up the museum of the society, and made 
 extensive contributions to biological science. 
 
 His article on conchology, published in 1816 in the American 
 edition of Nicholson's Cyclopaedia, was the foundation of that 
 
 * 
 
 science in this country, and was republished in Philadelphia in 
 1819, with the title, ''A Description of the Land and Fresh- 
 water Shells of the United States." 
 
 " This work." remarked a contemporary, " ought to be in the 
 possession of every American lover of Natural Science. It has 
 been quoted by M. Lamarck and adopted by J/. de Ferrusac, 
 and has thus taken its place in the scientific world." 
 
 Such was fame in America in the year of grace 1820. 
 
 In 1817 he did a similar service for systematic entomology, 
 and his contributions to herpetology, to the study of marine 
 invertebrates, especially the Crustacea, and to that of invertebrate 
 paleontology, were equally fundamental. 
 
 As naturalist of Long's expeditions he described many Western 
 vertebrates, and also collected Indian vocabularies, and it is 
 said that the narrative of the expeditions was chiefly based upon 
 the contents of his note-books. 
 
 In 1825 he removed from Philadelphia to New Harmony. In- 
 diana, and, in company with Maclure and Troost, became a 
 member of the community founded there by Owen of Lanark. 
 Comparatively little was thenceforth done by him, and we can 
 only regret the untimely close of so brilliant a career.* 
 
 * See Memoirs by B. H. Coates, read before American Philosophical 
 Society, Dec. 16, 1834. Memoirs by George Ord; also a tribute to his 
 memory in Ball's presidential address before the Society in January, 1888 
 
68 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Charles Alexander Lesueur [b. at Havre-de-Grace, France, 
 Jan. i, 1778, d. at Havre, Dec. 12, 1846], the friend and associate 
 of Maclure and Say, accompanied them to New Harmony. The 
 romantic life of this talented Frenchman has been well narrated 
 in his biography by Ord.* He was one of the staff' of the Bau- 
 din expedition to Australia in 1800, and to his efforts, seconding 
 those of Peron, his associate, were due most of the scientific 
 results which France obtained from that ill-fated enterprise. 
 Lesueur, though a naturalist of considerable ability, was, above 
 all, an artist. The magnificent plates in the reports prepared by 
 Peron f and Freycinet J were all his. He was called "the 
 Raffaelle of zoological painters," and his removal to America in 
 1815 was greatly deplored by European naturalists. He travelled 
 for three years with Maclure, exploring the West Indies and the 
 eastern United States, making a magnificent collection of draw- 
 ings of fishes and invertebrates, and in 1818 settled in Philadel- 
 phia, where, supporting himself by giving drawing lessons, he 
 became an active member of the Academy of Sciences, and 
 published manv papers in its Journal. 
 
 No one ever drew such exquisite figures of fishes as Lesueur, 
 and it is greatly to be regretted that he never completed his pro- 
 jected work upon North American Ichthyology. He issued a 
 prospectus, with specimen plates, of a "Memoir on the Medusas," 
 and his name will always be associated with the earliest American 
 work upon marine invertebrates and invertebrate paleontology, 
 because it was to him that Say undoubtedly owed his first ac- 
 quaintance with these departments of zoology. In 1820, while 
 at Albany in the service of the United States and Canadian 
 Boundary Commission, he gave lessons to Eaton and identified 
 his fossils, thus laying the foundations for the future work of 
 the rising school of New 'York paleontologists. 
 
 * ORD : Memoir of Charles Alexander Lesueur. Am. Jour. Set'., 2d ser., 
 viii, p. 189. 
 
 t Voyage des Decouvertes aux Terres Australes. 
 J Voyage aux Terres Australes. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 69 
 
 Twelve years of his life were wasted at New Harmony, and 
 in 1837, after the death of Say, he returned to France, oarrying 
 his collections and drawings to the Natural History Museum at 
 Havre, of which he became Curator. His period of productive- 
 ness was limited to the six years of his residence in Philadelphia. 
 But for their sacrifice to the socialistic ideas of Owen, Say and 
 Lesueur would doubtless be counted among the most distin- 
 guished of our naturalists, and the course of American zoolog- 
 ical research would have been entirely different. 
 
 The Rev. Daniel H. Barnes [b. 1785-, d. 1828], of New York, 
 a graduate of Union College and a Baptist preacher, was one of 
 Say's earliest disciples, and from 1823 he published papers on 
 conchology, beginning with an elaborate study of the fresh-water 
 mussels. This group was taken up in 1827 by Dr. Isaac Lea, 
 and discussed from year to year in his well-known series of 
 beautifully illustrated monographs. 
 
 Mr. Barnes published, also, papers on the " Classification of the 
 Chitonidae,'' on 4> Batrachian Animals and Doubtful Reptiles," 
 and on " Magnetic Polarity." 
 
 The officers of the Navy had already begun their contributions 
 to natural history which have been so serviceable in later years. 
 One of the earliest contributions by Barnes was a description of 
 five species of Chiton collected in Peru by Capt. C. S. Ridgely, 
 of the " Constellation." 
 
 In this period (18284-) was begun the publication of Audu- 
 bon's folio volumes of illustrations of North American birds 
 a most extraordinary work, of which Cuvier enthusiastically ex- 
 claimed : ik C'est le plus magnifique monument que 1'Art ait en- 
 core eleve a la Nature." 
 
 Wilson was the Wordsworth of American naturalists, but Au- 
 dubon was their Rubens. With pen as well as with brush he 
 delineated those wonderful pictures which have been the delight 
 of the world. 
 
70 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Born in 1781, in Louisiana, while it was still a Spanish colony, 
 he became, at an early age, a pupil of the famous French painter 
 David, under whose tuition he acquired the rudiments 
 of his art. Returning to America, he began the career of an ex- 
 plorer, and for over half a century his life was spent, for the 
 most part, in the forests or in the preparation of his ornitholog- 
 ical publications occasionally visiting England and France, 
 where he had many admirers. His devotion to his work was as 
 complete and self-sacrificing as that of Bowditch, the story of 
 whose translation of LaPlace has already been referred to. It 
 was a great surprise to his friends (though his own fervor did 
 not permit him to doubt) that the sale of his folio volumes was 
 sufficient to pay his printer's bills. Audubon was not a very 
 accomplished systematic zoologist, and when serious discrimi- 
 nations of species was necessary, sometimes formed alliances 
 with others. Thus Bachman became his collaborator in the 
 study of mammals, and the youthful Baird was invited by him, 
 shortly before his death in 1851, to join him in an ornithological 
 partnership. His relations with Alexander Wilson form the 
 subject of a most entertaining narration in the " Ornithological 
 Biography."* 
 
 Thomas Nuttall [b. in Yorkshire, 1786, d.-at St. Helens, Lanca- 
 shire, Sept. 10, 1859] was so thoroughly identified with Ameri- 
 can natural history and so entirely unconnected with that of 
 England that, although he returned to his native land to die, we 
 may fairly claim him as one of our own worthies. He crossed 
 the ocean when about twenty-one years of age, and travelled in 
 every part of the United States and in the Sandwich Islands 
 studying birds and plants. From 1822 to 1828 he was curator 
 and lecturer at the Harvard Botanical Garden. Besides numer- 
 ous papers in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy, 
 he published in Philadelphia, in 1818, his " Genera of North 
 
 * i, P. 439- 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 71 
 
 American Plants," in his " Geological Sketch of the Valley of 
 the Mississippi," in 1821 ; his " Journal of Travels into the Ar- 
 kansas Territory," a work abounding in natural history obser- 
 vations ; in 1832-4 his " Manual of the Ornithology of the United 
 States and Canada ;" and in 1843-9 ms " North American Sylva," 
 a continuation of the Sylva of Michaux. About 1850 he retired 
 to a rural estate in England, where he died in 1859. 
 
 Nuttall was not great as a botanist, as a geologist, or a zoolo- 
 gist, but was a man useful, beloved, and respected. 
 
 Richard Harlan, M. D. [b. 1796, d. 1843], who, with Mitchill, 
 Say, Rafinesque, and Gosse, was one of the earliest of our herpetolo- 
 gists. and who was one of Audubon's chief friends and supporters, 
 published in 1825 the first instalment of his " Fauna Americana," 
 which treated exclusively of mammals. This was followed, in 
 1826, by a rival work on mammals, by Godman. Harlan's book 
 was a compilation, based largely on translations of portions of 
 Desmarest's " Mammalogie," printed three years before in Paris. 
 It was so severely criticised that the second portion, which was 
 to have been devoted to reptiles, was never published, and its 
 author turned his attention to medical literature. Godman's 
 " North American Natural History, or Mastology," contained 
 much original matter, and, though his contemporaries received it 
 with faint praise, it is the only separate, compact, illustrated 
 treatise on the mammals of North America ever published, and is 
 useful to the present day. John D. Godman [b. in Annapolis, 
 Md., Dec. 20, 1794, d. in Germantown, Pa., Apl. 17, 1830] died 
 an untimely death, but gave promise of a brilliant and useful 
 career as a teacher and investigator. His "' Rambles of a Nat- 
 uralist " is one of the best series of essays of the Selborne type 
 ever produced by an American, and his "American Natural His- 
 tory " is a work of much importance, even to the present day, 
 embodying as it does a large number of original observations. 
 
 Michaux's Sylva was, as we have seen, continued by Nuttall : 
 
72 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 Wilson's American Ornithology was, in like manner, continued 
 by Charles Lucien Bonaparte [b. in Paris, May 24, 1803, d. 
 in Paris, July 30, 1857], Prince of Canino, and nephew of 
 Napoleon the First, a master in systematic zoology. Bonaparte 
 came to the United States about the year 1822, and returned to 
 Italy in 1828. His contributions to zoological science were of 
 great importance. In 1827, he published in Pisa his " Specchio 
 comparative delle ornithologie di Roma e di Filadelfia," and 
 from 1825 to 1833 his "American Ornithology," containing de- 
 scriptions of over one hundred species of birds discovered by 
 himself. 
 
 The publication of Torrey's " Flora of the Middle and North- 
 ern Sections of the United States " was an event of importance, 
 as was also Dr. W. J. Hooker's essay on the Botany of 
 America,* the first general treatise upon the American flora or 
 fauna, by a master abroad, is pretty sure evidence that the work 
 of home naturalists was beginning to tell. 
 
 So, also, in a different way, was the .appearance in 1829 of 
 the first edition of Mrs. Lincoln's " Familiar Lectures on Bot- 
 any," a work which did much toward swelling the army of 
 amateur botanists. 
 
 Important work was also in progress in geology. Eaton and 
 Beck were carrying on the Van Rensselaer survey of New York, 
 and in 1818 the former published his " Index to the Geology of 
 the Northern States." Prof. Denison Olmstead, of the Univer- 
 sity of North Carolina, was completing the official survey of 
 that State the first ever authorized by the government of a State. 
 
 Prof. Lardner Vanuxem, of North Carolina, in 1828, made an 
 important advance, being the first to avail himself successfully of 
 paleontology for the determination of the age of several of our 
 formations, and their approximate synchronism with European 
 beds.f 
 
 * Brewster's Edinburgh Journal of Science, iii, p. 103. 
 t Gill. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 73 
 
 Horace H. Hayden, of Baltimore [b. 1769? d. 1844], pub- 
 lished in 1820 " Geological Essays, or an inquiry into some of 
 the geological phenomena to be found in various parts of America 
 and elsewhere,"* which was well received as a contribution to 
 the history of alluvial formations of the globe, and was apparently 
 the first general work on geology published in this country. 
 Silliinan said that it should be a text-book in all the schools. 
 He published, also, a " New Method of preserving Ana- 
 tomical Preparations,"! " A Singular ore of Cobalt and Manga- 
 nese,"! on "The Bare Hills near Baltimore,")] and on "Silk 
 Cocoons, " and was a founder and vice-president of the Maryland 
 Academy of Sciences. 
 
 XV. 
 
 In the fourth decade (1830-40) the leading spirits were Silli- 
 inan, Hare, Olmstead, Hitchcock, Torrey, DeKay, Henry, and 
 Morse. 
 
 Among the men just coming into prominence were J. W. 
 Draper, then professor in Hampden Sidney College, in Virginia, 
 the brothers W. B. and H. D. Rogers, A. A. Gould the 
 conchologist, and James D. Dana. 
 
 Henry was just making his first discoveries in physics, having, 
 in 1829, pointed out the possibility of electro-magnetism as a 
 motive power, and in 1831 set up his first telegraphic circuit at 
 Albany. In 1832 the United States Coast Survey, discontinued 
 in i Si 8, was reorganized under the direction of its first chief, 
 Hassler, now advanced in years.^f 
 
 The natural history survey of New York was organized by the 
 
 * Rev. Sill. Journ., iii, 47. Blackwood's Mag., xvi, 420; xvii, 56. 
 
 t American Medical Record, 1822. 
 
 | Ibid. 1832. || Silliman's Journal, 1822. 
 
 Journ. Amer. Silk Company, 1839. 
 
 ^Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sei., H, 163. 
 
74 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 State in 1836, and James Hall and Ebenezer Emmons were 
 placed upon its staff. 
 
 G. W. Featherstonhaugh [b. 1780, d. 1866] was conducting 
 (1834-5) a Government expedition, exploring the geology of 
 the elevated country between the Missouri and Red rivers and 
 the Wisconsin territories. He bore the name of" United States 
 Geologist," and projected a geological map of the United States, 
 which now, half a century later, is being completed by the U. S. 
 geologist of to-day. Besides his report upon the survey just 
 referred to, Featherstonhaugh printed a " Geological Reconnois- 
 sance, in 1835, from Green- Bay to Coteau des Prairies," and a 
 " Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor," in London, 1847. 
 
 In 1838 the United States Exploring Expedition under Wilkes 
 was sent upon its voyage of circumnavigation, having upon its staff 
 a young naturalist named Dana, whose studies upon the crusta- 
 ceans and radiates of the expedition have made him a world-wide 
 reputation, entirely independent of that which he has since gained 
 as a mineralogist and geologist. It is customary to refer to the 
 Wilkes expedition as having been sent out entirely in the inter- 
 ests of science. As a matter of fact it was organized primarily 
 in the interests of the whale fishery of the United States. 
 
 Dana, before his departure with Wilkes, had published, in 
 1837, tne fi rst edition of his " System of Mineralogy," a work 
 whjch, in its subsequent editions, has become the standard man- 
 ual of the world. 
 
 The publication of Ly ell's " Principles of Geology " at the be- 
 ginning of this decade (1830) had given new direction to the 
 thoughts of our geologists, and they were all hard at work under 
 its inspiration. 
 
 With 1839 en ded the second of our thirty-year periods the 
 .one which I have chosen to speak of as the period of Silliman 
 not so much because of the investigations of the New Haven 
 pnofessor, as on account of his influence in the promotion of 
 American Science and scientific institutions. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 75 
 
 This was a time of hard work, and we must not withhold our 
 praise from the noble little company of pioneers who were, in those 
 years, building the foundations upon which the scientific institu- 
 tions of to-day are resting. 
 
 The difficulties and drawbacks of scientific research at this time 
 have been well described by one who knew them :* 
 
 " The professedly scientific institutions of our country issued, 
 from time to time, though at considerable intervals, volumes of 
 transactions and proceedings unquestionably not without their 
 influence in keeping alive the scarcely kindled flame, but whose 
 contents, as might be expected, were, for the most part, rather in 
 conformity with the then existing standard of excellence than in 
 advance of it. Natural history in the United States was the mere 
 sorting of genera and species. The highest requisite for distinc- 
 tion in any physical science was the knowledge of what European 
 students had attained. Astronomy was, in general, confined to 
 observations, and those not of the most refined character, and its 
 merely descriptive departments were estimated far more highly 
 than the study of its laws. Astronomical computation had hardly 
 risen above the ciphering out of eclipses and occultations. Indeed, 
 I risk nothing in saying that astronomy had lost ground in Amer- 
 ica since those colonial times, when men like Rittenhouse kept 
 up a constant scientific communication with students of astronomy 
 beyond the seas. And I believe I may farther say, that a single 
 instance of a man's devoting himself to science as the only earthly 
 guide, aim, and object of his life, while unassured of a professor's 
 chair or some analogous appointment upon which he might de- 
 pend for subsistence, was utterly* unknown. 
 
 " Such was the state of science in general. In astronomy the 
 expensive appliances requisite for all observations of the higher 
 class were wanting, and there was not in the United States, with 
 the exception of the Hudson Observatory, to which Professor 
 Loomis devoted such hours as he could spare from his duties in 
 the college, a single establishment provided with the means of mak- 
 ing an absolute determination of the place of any celestial body, or 
 even relative determinations at all commensurate in accuracy w r ith 
 the demands of the times. The only instrument that could be 
 thought of for the purpose was the Yale College telescope, which, 
 although provided with a micrometer, was destitute of the means 
 of identifying comparison-stars. A better idea of American as- 
 tronomy a dozen years ago can hardly be obtained than by quot- 
 
 * GOULD, B. A. Address in commemoration of Sears Cook WalkeV 
 <Proc. Amer. Assoc. Ad. Set., viii, 25 
 
76 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 ing from an article published at that time by the eminent geometer 
 who now retires from the position of President of this Association. 
 He will forgive me the liberty for the sake of the illustration. 
 * The impossibility,' said he, ' of great national progress in as- 
 tronomy, while the materials are, for the most part, imported, can 
 hardly need to be impressed upon the patrons of science in this 
 country. * * * And next to the support of observers is the 
 establishment of observatories. Something has been done for this 
 purpose in various parts of the country, and it is earnestly to be 
 hoped that the intimations which we have heard regarding the in- 
 tentions of Government may prove to be well founded ; that we 
 shall soon have a permanent national observatory equal in its ap- 
 pointments to the best furnished ones of Europe ; and that Ameri- 
 can ships will ere long calculate their longitudes and latitudes from 
 an American nautical almanac. That there is on this side of the 
 Atlantic a sufficient capacity for celestial observations is amply 
 attested by the success which has attended the efforts, necessarily 
 humble which have hitherto been made.'"* 
 
 XVI. 
 
 Just before the middle of the century a wave, or to speak more 
 accurately, a series of waves of intellectual activity began to pass 
 over Europe and America. There was a renaissance, quite as 
 important as that which occurred in Europe at the close of the 
 Middle Ages. Draper and other historians have pointed out the 
 causes of this movement, prominent among which were the in- 
 troduction of steam and electricity, annihilating space and 
 relieving mankind from a great burden of mechanical drudgery. 
 It was the beginning of the " age of science," and political as well 
 as social and industrial changes followed in rapid succession. 
 
 In Europe the great work began a little earlier. Professor 
 Huxley, in his address to the Royal Society in 1885, took for a 
 fixed point his own birthday in 1825, which was four months 
 before the completion of the railway between Stockton and 
 Darlington " the ancestral representative of the vast reticulated 
 fetching and carrying organism which now extends its meshes 
 over the civilized world." Since then, he remarked, " the greater 
 
 * PEIRCE, BENJAMIN, Cambridge Miscellany, 1842, p. 25. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 77 
 
 part of the vast body of knowledge which constitutes the modenl 
 sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology has been 
 acquired, and the widest generalizations therefrom have been 
 deduced, and, furthermore, the majority of those applications of 
 scientific knowledge to practical ends which have brought about 
 the most striking differences between our present civilization and 
 that of antiquity have been made within that period of time." 
 
 It is within the past half century, he continued, that the most 
 brilliant additions have been made to fact and theory and service- 
 able hypothesis in the region of pure science, for within this time 
 falls the establishment on a safe basis of the greatest of all the 
 generalizations of science, the doctrines of the Conservation of 
 Energy and of Evolution. Within this time the larger moiety of 
 our knowledge of light, heat, electricity, and magnetism has been 
 acquired. Our present chemistry has been, in great part, created, 
 while the whole science has been remodelled from foundation to 
 roof. 
 
 4 ' It may be natural," continued Professor Huxley, " that 
 progress should appear most striking to me among those sciences 
 to which my own attention has been directed, but I do not think 
 this will wholly account for the apparent advance ' by leaps and 
 bounds' of the biological sciences within my recollection. The 
 cell theory was the latest novelty when I began to work with the 
 microscope, and I have watched the building of the whole vast 
 fabric of histology. I can say almost as much of embryology, 
 since Von Baer's great work was published in 1828. Our 
 knowledge of the morphology of the lower plants and animals 
 and a great deal of that of the higher forms has very largely been 
 obtained in my time ; while physiology has been put upon a to- 
 tally new foundation, and, as it were, reconstructed, by the thor- 
 ough application of the experimental method to the study of the 
 phenomena of life, and by the accurate determination of the 
 purely physical and chemical components of these phenomena. 
 
78 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 The exact nature of the processes of sexual and non-sexual repro- 
 duction has been brought to light. Our knowledge of geograph- 
 ical and geological distribution and of the extinct forms of life 
 has been increased a hundredfold. As for the progress of geo- 
 logical science, what more need be said than that the first volume 
 of Ly ell's ' Principles ' bears the date of 1830." 
 
 It cannot be expected that, within the limits of this address, I 
 should attempt to show what America has done in the last half 
 century. I am striving to trace the beginnings, not the results, of 
 scientific work on this side of the Atlantic. I will simply quote 
 what was said by the London Times in 1876 : 
 
 " In the natural distribution of subjects, the history of enter- 
 prise, discovery, and conquest, and the growth of republics, fell 
 to America, and she has dealt nobly with them. In the wider 
 and more multifarious provinces of art and science she runs neck 
 and neck with the mother country and is never left behind." 
 
 It is difficult to determine exactly the year when the first 
 waves of this renaissance reached the shores of America. Silli- 
 man, in his Priestley address, placed the date at 184^. I should 
 rather say 1840, when the first national scientific association was 
 organized, although signs of awakening maybe detected even be- 
 fore the beginning of the previous decade. We must, however, 
 carefully avoid giving too much prominence to the influence of 
 individuals. I have spoken of this period of thirty years as the 
 period of Agassiz. Agassiz, however, did not bring the waves 
 with him ; he came in on the crest of one of them ; he was not 
 the founder of modern American natural history, but, as a public 
 teacher and organizer of institutions, he exerted a most important 
 influence upon its growth. 
 
 One of the leading events of the decade was the reorganization 
 of the Coast Survey in 1844, un der the sage administration of 
 Alexander Dallas Bache,* speedily followed by the beginning of 
 
 *Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci., ii, 164. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 79 
 
 investigations upon the Gulf Stream, and of the researches of 
 Count Pourtales into its fauna, which laid the foundations of mod- 
 ern deep-sea exploration. Others were the founding of the 
 Lawrence Scientific School, the Cincinnati Observatory, the 
 Yale Analytical Laboratory, the celebration of the Centennial 
 Jubilee of the American Philosophical Society in 1843, and the 
 enlargement of Silliman's " American Journal of Science." 
 
 The Naval Astronomical Expedition was sent to Chili, under 
 Gibbon (1849), to make observations upon the parallax of the 
 sun. Lieut. Lynch was sent to Palestine (in 1848) at the head 
 of an expedition to explore the Jordan and the Dead Sea. 
 
 Fremont conducted expeditions, in 1848, to explore the 
 Rocky Mountains and the territory beyond, and Stansbury, in 1 
 i849-'5o, a similar exploration of the valley of the Great Salt 
 Lake. David Dale Owen was heading a Government Geological 
 Survey in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota (1848), and from all 
 of these came results of importance to science and to natural 
 history. 
 
 In 1849, Prof. W. H. Harvey, of Dublin, visited America and 
 collected materials for his Nereis B or eali- Americana, which 
 was the foundation of our marine botany. 
 
 Sir Charles Lyell, ex-President of the Geological Society 
 of London, visited the United States in 1841 and again in 184^, 
 and published two volumes of travels, which were, however, of 
 much less importance than the effects of his encouraging presence 
 upon the rising school of American geologists. His " Principles 
 of Geology," as has already been said, was an epoch-making 
 work, and he was to his generation almost what Darwin was to 
 the one which followed. 
 
 Certain successes of our astronomers and physicists had a bear- 
 ing upon the progress of American science in all its departments, 
 which was., perhaps, even greater than their actual importance 
 would seem to warrant. These were the discovery, by the Bards 
 
80 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 of Cambridge, of Bards comet in 1846, of the satellite Hyperion 
 in 1848, of the third ring of Saturn in 1850, the discovery by 
 Herrick and Bradley, in 1846, of the bi-partition of Belas comet, 
 and the application of the telegraph to longitude determination 
 after Locke had constructed, in 1848, his clock for the registra- 
 tion of time observations by means of electro-magnetism. 
 
 It is almost ludicrous at this day to observe the grateful senti- 
 ments with which our men of science welcomed the adoption of 
 this American method in the observatory at Greenwich. 
 
 Americans were still writhing under the sting of Sidney 
 Smith's demand "Who reads an American book?" and the nar- 
 rations of those critical observers of national customs, Dickens, 
 Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope. 
 
 The continental approval of American science was like balsam 
 to the sensitive spirits of our countrymen. 
 
 John William Draper's versatile and original researches in 
 physics were also yielding weighty results, and as early as 1847 
 he had already laid the foundations of the science of spectroscopy 
 which Kirchhoffso boldly appropriated many years later. 
 
 Most important of all, by reason of its breadth of scope, was 
 the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution, which was organ- 
 ized in 1846 by the election of Joseph Henry to its secretaryship. 
 Who can attempt to say what the conditions of science in the 
 United States would be to-day, but for the bequest of Smithson? 
 In the words of John Quincy Adams, " Of all the foundations 
 or establishments for pious or charitable uses which ever signal- 
 ized the spirit of the age or the comprehensive beneficence of the 
 founder, none can be named more deserving the approbation of 
 mankind." 
 
 Among the leaders of this new enterprise and of the scientific 
 activities of the day may be named : Silliman, Hare, Henry, 
 Bache, Maury, Alexander, Locke, Mitchel, Peirce, Walker, 
 Draper, Dana, Wyman, Agassiz, Gray, Torrey, Haldeman, 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 81 
 
 Morton, Holbrook, Gibbes, Gould, DeKay, Storer, Hitchcock, 
 Redfield, the brothers Rogers, Jackson, Hays, and Owen. 
 
 Among the rising men were Baird, Adams the conchologist, 
 Burnett, Harris the entomologist, and the LeConte brothers 
 among zoologists; Lapham, D. C. Eaton, and Grant, among 
 botanists; Sterry Hunt, Brush, J. D. Whitney, Wolcott Gibbs, 
 and Lesley, among chemists and geologists, as well as Schiel, 
 of St. Louis, who had before 1842 discovered the principle of 
 chemical homology. 
 
 I have not time to say what ought to be said of the coming of 
 Agassiz in 1846. He lives in the hearts of his adopted country- 
 men. He has a colossal monument in the museum which he 
 reared, and a still greater one in the lives and works of pupils 
 such as Agassiz, Allen, Burgess, Burnett, Brooks, Clarke, Cooke, 
 Faxon, Fewkes, Gorman, Hartt, Hyatt, Joseph LeConte, Lyman, 
 McCrady, Morse, Mills, Niles, Packard, Putnam, Scudder, St. 
 John, Shaler, Verrill, Wilder, and David A. Wells. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 They were glorious men who represented American science at 
 the middle of the century. We may well wonder whether the 
 present decade will make as good a showing forty years hence. 
 
 The next decade was its continuation. The old leaders were 
 nearly all active, and to their ranks were added many more. 
 
 An army of new men was rising up. 
 
 It was a period of great explorations, for the frontier of the 
 United States was sweeping westward, and there was need of n 
 better knowledge of the public domain. 
 
 Sitgreaves explored the region of the Zufii and Colorado rivers 
 in 1852, and Marcy the Red River of the North. The Mexican 
 boundary survey, under Emory, was in progress from 1854 * 
 1856, and at the same time the various Pacific railroad surveys. 
 There was also the Herndon exploration of the valley of the Am- 
 
82 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 azon, and the North Pacific exploring expedition under Rogers. 
 These were the days, too, when that extensive exploration of 
 British North America was begun, through the co-operation of 
 the Hudson's Bay Company with the Smithsonian Institution. 
 
 It was the harvest-time of the museums. Agassiz was building 
 up with immense rapidity his collections in Cambridge, utilizing 
 to the fullest extent the methods which he had learned in the 
 great European establishments and the public spirit and generosity 
 of the Americans. Baird was using his matchless powers of 
 organization in equipping and inspiring the officers of the various 
 surveys, and accumulating immense collections to be used in the 
 interest of the future National Museum. 
 
 Systematic natural history advanced with rapid strides. The 
 magnificent folio reports of the Wilkes expedition were now 
 being published, and some of them, particularly those by Dana 
 on the crustaceans and the zoophytes and geology, that of Gould 
 upon the mollusks, those by Torrey, Gray, and Eaton upon the 
 plants, were of great importance. 
 
 The reports of the domestic surveys contained numerous papers 
 upon systematic natural history, prepared under the direction of 
 Baird, assisted by Girard, Gill, Cassin, Suckley, LeConte, Cooper, 
 and others. The volumes relating to the mammals and the birds, 
 prepared by Baird's own pen, were the first exhaustive treatises 
 upon the mammalogy and ornithology of the United States. 
 
 The American Association was doing a great work in popular 
 education through its system of meeting each year in a different 
 city. In 1850 it met in Charleston, and its entire expenses were 
 paid by the city corporation as a valid mark of public approval, 
 while the foundation of the Charleston museum of natural his- 
 tory was one of the direct results of the meeting. 
 
 In 1857 it me t * n Montreal, and delegates from the .English 
 scientific societies were present ; this was one of the earliest of 
 those manifestations of international courtesy upon scientific 
 ground of which there have since been many. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDEESS. 83 
 
 In the seventh decade, which began with threatenings of civil 
 war, the growth of science was almost arrested. A meeting of 
 the American Association was to have been held in Nashville in 
 1861, but none was called. In 1866, at Buffalo, its sessions were 
 resumed with the old board of officers elected in 1860. One of 
 the vice-presidents, Gibbes, of South Carolina, had not been 
 heard from since the war began, and the Southern members 
 were all absent. Many of the Northern members wrote, explain- 
 ing that they could not attend this meeting because they 
 could not afford it, " such had been the increase of liv- 
 ing expenses, without a corresponding increase in the salaries 
 of men of science." Few scientists were engaged in the war, 
 though one, O. M. Mitchel, who left the directorship of the 
 Dudley observatory to accept the command of an Ohio brigade, 
 died in service in 1862, and another, Couthouy, sacrificed his 
 life in the navy. Others, like Ordway, left the ranks of science 
 never to resume their places as investigators. 
 
 Scientific effort was paralyzed, and attention was directed to 
 other matters. In 1864, when the Smithsonian building was 
 burned, Lincoln, it is said, looking at the flames from the win- 
 dows of the Executive Mansion, remarked to some military offi- 
 cers who were present: "Gentlemen, yonder is a national 
 calamity. We have no time to think about it now. We must 
 attend to other things." 
 
 The only important events during the war were two ; one 
 the organization of the National Academy of Sciences, which 
 soon became what Bache had remarked the necessity for in 
 1851, when he said: "An institution of science, supplementary 
 to existing ones, is much needed to guide public action in refer- 
 ence to scientific matters."* 
 
 The other was the passage, in 1862, of the bill for the estab- 
 lishment of scientific educational institutions in every State. 
 
 * Proc. Amer. Assoc. Adv. Sci., vi, xlviii. 
 
84 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 The agricultural colleges were then, as they still are, unpopular 
 among many scientific men, but the wisdom of the measure is 
 apparently before long to be justified. 
 
 Before the end of the decade, the Northern States* had begun a 
 career of renewed prosperity, and the scientific institutions were 
 reorganized. The leading spirits were such men as Pierce, 
 Henry, Agassiz, Gray, Barnard, the Goulds, Newberry, Lea, 
 Whittlesey, Foster, Rood, Cooke, Newcomb, Newton, Wy- 
 man, Winchell. 
 
 Among the rising men, some of them very prominent before 
 1870, were Barker, Bolton, Chandler, Eggleston, Hall, Hark- 
 ness, Langley, Mayer, Pickering, Young, Powell, Pumpelly, 
 Abbe, Collett, Emerson, Hartt, Lupton, Marsh, Whitfield, 
 Williams, N. H. Winchell, Agassiz, the Aliens, Beale, Cope, 
 Coues, Canby, Dall, Hoy, Hyatt, Morse, Orton, Perkins, Rey, 
 Riley, Scudder, Sidney Smith, Stearns, Turtle, Verrill, Wood. 
 
 Soon after the war the surveys of the West, which have coa- 
 lesced to form the U. S. Geological Survey, were forming under 
 the direction of Clarence Cook, Lieut. Wheeler, F. V. Hay den, 
 and Major Powell. 
 
 The discovery of the nature of the corona of the sun by Young 
 and Harkness in 1869 was an event encouraging to the rising 
 spirits of our workers. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 With 1869 we reach the end of the third period and the thresh- 
 old of that in which we are living. I shall not attempt to define 
 the characteristics of the natural history of to-day, though I wish 
 to direct attention to certain tendencies and conditions which 
 exist. Let me, however, refer once more to the past, since it 
 leads again directly up to the present. 
 
 * See A D WHITE'S Scientific and Industrial Education in the United 
 States. < Popular Science Monthly, v, p. 170. 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 85 
 
 In a retrospect published in 1876,* one of our leaders stated 
 that American science during the first forty years of the present 
 century was in u a state of general lethargy, broken now and 
 then by the activity of some first-class man, which, however, 
 commonly ceased to be directed into purely scientific channels." 
 This depiction was, no doubt, somewhat true of the physical 
 and mathematical sciences concerned, but not to the extent indi- 
 cated by the writer quoted. What could be more unjust to the 
 men of the last generation than this? " It is," continues he, 
 " strikingly illustrative of the absence of everything like an 
 effective national pride in science that two generations should 
 have passed without America having produced anything to con- 
 tinue the philosophical researches of Franklin." 
 
 I may not presume to criticise the opinion of the writer from 
 whom these words are quoted, but I cannot resist the tempta- 
 tion to repeat a paragraph from Prof. John W. Draper's eloquent 
 centennial address upon " Science in America :" 
 
 " In many of the addresses on the centennial occasion." he 
 said, " the shortcomings of the United States in extending the 
 boundaries of scientific knowledge, especially in the physical and 
 chemical departments, have been set forth. ' We must acknowl- 
 edge with shame our inferiority to other people,' says one. ' We 
 have done nothing,' says another. * * * But we must not 
 forget that many of these humiliating accusations are made by 
 persons who are not of authority in the matter ; who, because 
 they are ignorant of what has been done, think that nothing 
 has been done. They mistake what is merely a blank in their 
 own information for a blank in reality. In their alacrity to de- 
 preciate the merit of their own country they would have us confess 
 that, for the last century, we have been living on the reputation 
 of Franklin and his thunder-rod." 
 
 These are the words of one who, himself an Englishman by 
 birth, could, with excellent grace, upbraid our countrymen for 
 their lack of patriotism. 
 
 The early American naturalists have been reproached for de- 
 
 * North American Review. 
 
86 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 voting their time to explorations and descriptive natural history, 
 and their work depreciated, as being of a character beneath the 
 dignity of the biologists of to-day. 
 
 " The zoological science of the country," said the president of 
 the Natural History Section of the American Association a few 
 years since, "-presents itself in two distinct periods: The first 
 period may be recognized as embracing the lowest stages of the 
 science ; it included, among others, a class of men who busied 
 themselves in taking an inventory of the animals of the country, 
 an important and necessary w r ork to be compared to that of the 
 hewers and diggers who first settle a new country, but in their 
 work demanded no deep knowledge or breadth of view." 
 
 It is quite unnecessary to defend systematic zoology from such 
 slurs as this, nor do I believe that the writer quoted would really 
 defend the ideas which his words seem to convey, although, as 
 Professor Judd has regretfully confessed in his recent address 
 before the Geological Society of London, systematic zoologists 
 and botanists have become somewhat rare and out of fashion in 
 Europe in modern times. 
 
 The best vindication of the wisdom of our early writers will 
 be, I think, the presentation of a counter-quotation from another 
 presidential address, that of the venerable Dr. Bentham before 
 the Linnaean Society of London, in 1867: 
 
 "It is scarcely half a century," wrote Bentham, "since our 
 American brethren applied themselves in earnest to the in- 
 vestigation of the natural productions and physical condition of 
 their vast continent ; their progress, especially during the latter 
 half of that period, had been very rapid until the outbreak of the 
 recent war, so deplorable in its effects in the interests of science 
 as well as on the material prosperity of their country. The pe- 
 culiar condition of the North American Continent requires im- 
 peratively that its physical and biological statistics should be ac- 
 curately collected and authentically recorded, and that this should 
 be speedily done. It is more than any country, except our Aus- 
 tralian colonies, in a state of transition. Vast tracts of land are 
 still in what may be called almost a primitive state, unmodified 
 by the effects of civilization, uninhabited, or tenanted only by the 
 remnants of ancient tribes, whose unsettled life never exercised 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 87 
 
 much influence over the natural productions of the country. But 
 this state of things is rapidly passing away ; the invasion and 
 steady progress of a civilized population, whilst changing gen- 
 erally the face of nature, is obliterating many of the evidences 
 of a former state of things. It may be true that the call for re- 
 cording the traces of previous conditions may be particularly 
 strong in Ethnology and Archaeology ; but in our own branches 
 of the science, the observations and consequent theories of Dar- 
 win having called special attention to the history of species, it 
 becomes particularly important that accurate biological statistics 
 should be obtained for future comparison in those countries 
 where the circumstances influencing those conditions are the most 
 rapidly changing. The larger races of wild animals are dwin- 
 dling down, like the aboriginal inhabitants, under the deadly in- 
 fluence of civilized man. Myriads of the lower orders of animal 
 life, as well .as of plants, disappear with the destruction of forests, 
 the drainage of swamps, and the gradual spread of cultivation, 
 and their places are occupied by foreign invaders. Other races, 
 no doubt, without actually disappearing, undergo a gradual change 
 under the new order of things, which, if perceptible only in the 
 course of successive generations, require so much the more for 
 future proof an accurate record of their state in the still unsettled 
 condition of the country. In the Old World almost every at- 
 tempt to compare the present state of vegetation or animal life 
 with that which existed in uncivilized times is in a great meas- 
 ure frustrated by the absolute want of evidence as to that former 
 state ; but in North America the change is going forward, as it 
 were, close under the eye of the observer. This consideration 
 may one day give great value to the reports of the naturalist sent 
 by the Government, as we have seen, at the instigation of the 
 Smithsonian Institution and other promoters of science, to ac- 
 company the surveys of new territories." 
 
 Having said this much in defence of the scientific men of the 
 United States, I wish, in conclusion, to prefer some very serious 
 charges against the country at large, or, rather, as a citizen of 
 the United States, to make some very melancholy and humili- 
 ating confessions. 
 
 The present century is often spoken of as " the age of science,'* 
 and Americans are somewhat disposed to be proud of the mannei 
 in which scientific institutions are fostered and scientific investi- 
 gators encouraged on this side of the Atlantic. 
 
 Our countrymen have made very important advances in many 
 
88 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 departments of research. We have a few admirably organized 
 laboratories and observatories, a few good collections of scientific 
 books, six or eight museums worthy of the name, and a score or 
 more of scientific and technological schools, well organized and 
 better provided with officers than with money. We have several 
 strong scientific societies, no one of which, however, publishes 
 transactions worthy of its own standing and the collective reputa- 
 tion of its members. In fact, the combined publishing funds of all 
 our societies would not pay for the annual issue of a volume of 
 memoirs, such as appears under the auspices of any one of a dozen 
 European societies which might be named. 
 
 Our Government, by a liberal support of its scientific depart- 
 ments, has done much to atone for the really feeble manner in 
 which local institutions have been maintained. The Coast Sur- 
 vey, the Geological Surveys, the Department of Agriculture, the 
 Fish Commissions, the Army, with its Meteorological Bureau, its 
 Medical Museum and Library, and its explorations ; the Navy, 
 with its Observatory, its laboratories and its explorations ; and in 
 addition to these, the Smithsonian Institution, with its systematic 
 promotion of all good works in science, have accomplished more 
 than is ordinarily placed to their credit. Many hundreds of vol- 
 umes of scientific memoirs have been issued from the Government 
 printing office since 1870, and these have been distributed in such 
 a generous and far-reaching way that they have not failed to reach 
 every town and village in the United States where a roof has been 
 provided to protect them. 
 
 It may be that some one will accuse the Government of having 
 usurped the work of the private publisher. Very little of value 
 in the way of scientific literature has been issued during the same 
 period by publishers, except in reprints or translations of works 
 of foreign investigators. It should be borne in mind, however, 
 that our Government has not only published the results of investi- 
 gations, but has supported the investigators and provided them 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 89 
 
 with laboratories, instruments and material, and that the me- 
 moirs which it has issued would never, as a rule, have been ac- 
 cepted by private publishers. 
 
 I do not wish to underrate the efficiency of American men of 
 science, nor the enthusiasm with which many public men and cap- 
 italists have promoted our scientific institutions. Our countrymen 
 have had wonderful successes in many directions. They have 
 borne their share in the battle of science against the unknown. 
 They have had abundant recognition from their fellow-workers 
 in the Old World. They have met perhaps a more intelligent 
 appreciation abroad than at home. It is the absence of home ap- 
 preciation that causes us very much foreboding for the future. 
 
 In Boston or Cambridge, in New York, Philadelphia, Bal- 
 timore, Washington, Chicago, or San Francisco, and in most of 
 the college towns, a man interested in science may find others 
 ready to talk over with him a new scientific book, or a discovery 
 which has excited his interest. Elsewhere, the chances are, he 
 will have to keep his thoughts to himself. One may quickly re- 
 cite the names of the towns and cities in which may be found ten 
 or more people whose knowledge of any science is aught than 
 vague and rudimentary. Let me illustrate my idea by supposing 
 that every inhabitant of the United States, over fifteen years of 
 age, should be required to mention ten living men eminent in sci- 
 entific work, would one out of a hundred be able to respond? 
 Does any one suppose that there are three or four hundred thou- 
 sand people enlightened to this degree ? 
 
 Let us look at some statistics, or, rather, some facts, which 
 it is convenient to arrange in statistical form. The total number 
 of white inhabitants of the United States in 1880 was about forty- 
 two millions. The total number of naturalists, as shown in the 
 Naturalist's Directory for 1886, was a little over 4,600. This 
 list includes not only the investigators, who probably do not ex- 
 ceed five hundred in number, and the advanced teachers, who 
 
90 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 muster, perhaps, one thousand strong, but all who are sufficiently 
 interested in science to have selected special lines of study. 
 
 We have, then, one person interested in science to about ten 
 thousand inhabitants. But the leaven of science is not evenly dis- 
 tributed through the national loaf. It is the tendency of scientific 
 men to congregate together. In Washington, for instance, there 
 is one scientific man to every 500 inhabitants, in Cambridge one 
 to 850, and in New Haven one to 1,100. In New Orleans the 
 proportion is one to 8,800, in Jersey City one to 24,000, in New 
 York one to 7,000, and in Brooklyn one to 8,500. I have before 
 me the proportions worked out for the seventy-five principal cities 
 of the United States. The showing is suggestive, though no doubt 
 in some instances misleading. The tendency to gregariousness 
 on the part of scientific men may, perhaps, be further illustrated by 
 a reference to certain societies. The membership of the National 
 Academy of Sciences is almost entirely concentrated about Bos- 
 ton, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and New Haven. 
 Missouri has one member, Illinois one, Ohio one, Maryland, New- 
 Jersey and Rhode Island three, and California four while thirty- 
 two States and Territories are not represented. A precisely sim- 
 ilar distribution of members is found in the American Society of 
 Naturalists. A majority of the members of the American Associ- 
 ation for the Advancement of Science live in New York, Massa- 
 chusetts, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Michigan, Min- 
 nesota, Ohio, Illinois and New Jersey. 
 
 It has been stated that the average proportion of scientific 
 men to the population at large is one to ten thousand. A more 
 minute examination shows that while fifteen of the States and Ter- 
 ritories have more than the average proportion of scientific men, 
 thirty-two have less. Oregon and California, Michigan and Del- 
 aware have very nearly the normal number. Massachusetts, 
 Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, Colorado and Florida have 
 about one to four thousand. West Virginia, Nevada, Arkansas, 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 91 
 
 Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, Alabama and the Caro- 
 linas are the ones least liberally furnished. Certain cities appear 
 to be absolutely without scientific men. The worst cases of des- 
 titution seem to be Paterson, New Jersey, a city of 50,000 in- 
 habitants, Wheeling, with 30,000, Qiiincy, Illinois, with 26,000, 
 Newport, Kentucky, with 20,000, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, 
 and Kingston, New York, with 18,000, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 
 and Zanesville, Ohio, with 17,000, Oshkosh and Sandusky, with 
 15,000, Lincoln, Rhode Island, Norwalk, Connecticut, and 
 Brockton and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with 13,000. In these 
 there are no men of science recorded, and eight cities of more 
 than 15,000 inhabitants have only one, namely, Omaha, Ne- 
 braska, and St. Joseph, Missouri, Chelsea, Massachusetts, Co- 
 hoes, New York, Sacramento, California, Binghamton, New 
 York, Portland, Oregon, and Leadville, Colorado. 
 
 Of course these statistical statements are not properly statis- 
 tics. I have no doubt that some of these cities are misrepresented 
 in w r hat has been said. This much, however, is probably true, 
 that not one of them has a scientific society, a museum, a school 
 of science, or a sufficient number of scientific men to insure even 
 the occasional delivery of a course of scientific lectures. 
 
 Studying the distribution of scientific societies, we find that 
 there are fourteen States and Territories in w^hich there are no sci- 
 entific societies whatever. There are fourteen States which have 
 State academies of science or societies which are so organized as 
 to be equivalent to State academies. 
 
 Perhaps the most discouraging feature of all is the diminutive 
 circulation of scientific periodicals. In addition to a certain num- 
 ber of specialists' journals, we have in the United States three 
 which are wide enough in scope to be necessary to all who attempt 
 to keep an abstract of the progress of science. Of these, the Amer- 
 ican Journal of Science has, we are told, a circulation of less than 
 Soo ; the American Naturalist* less than 1,100, and Science* less 
 
92 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 than 6,000. A considerable proportion of the copies printed go, 
 as a matter of course, to public institutions, and not to individuals. 
 Even the Popular Science Monthly and the Scientific Ameri- 
 can, which appeal to large classes of unscientific readers, have 
 circulations absurdly small. 
 
 The most effective agents for the dissemination of scientific 
 intelligence are, probably, the religious journals, aided to some 
 extent by the agricultural journals, and to a very limited degree 
 by the weekly and daily newspapers. It is much to be -regretted 
 that several influential journals, which ten or fifteen years ago 
 gave attention to the publication of trustworthy scientific intelli- 
 gence, have of late almost entirely abandoned the effort. The 
 allusions to science in the majority of our newspapers are singu- 
 larly inaccurate and unscholarly, and too often science is referred 
 to only when some of its achievements offer opportunity for witti- 
 cism. 
 
 The statements which I have just made may, as I have said, 
 prove, in some instances erroneous, and, to some extent, mislead- 
 ing, but I think the general tendency of a careful study of the dis- 
 tribution of scientific men and institutions is to show that the peo- 
 ple of the United States, except in so far as they sanction by their 
 approval the work of the scientific departments of the Government, 
 and the institutions established by private munificence, have little 
 reason to be proud of the national attitude toward science. 
 
 I am, however, by no means despondent for the future. The 
 importance of scientific work is thoroughly appreciated, and it 
 is well understood that many important public duties can be per- 
 formed properly only by trained men of science. The claims of 
 science to a prominent place in every educational plan are every 
 year more fully conceded. Science is permeating the theory and 
 the practice of every art and every industry, as well as every de- 
 partment of learning. The greatest danger to science is, per- 
 haps, the fact that all who have studied at all within the 
 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 93 
 
 last quarter of a century have studied its rudiments and feel 
 competent to employ its methods and its language, and to form 
 judgments on the merits of current work. 
 
 In the meantime the professional men of science, the scholars, 
 and the investigators seem to me to be strangely indifferent to the 
 questions as to how the public at large is to be made familiar 
 with the results of their labors. It may be that the tendency to 
 specialization is destined to deprive the sciences of their former 
 hold upon popular interest, and that the study of zoology, bot- 
 any and geology, mineralogy and chemistry will become so 
 technical that each will require the exclusive attention of its 
 votaries for a period of years. It may be that we are to have no 
 more zoologists such as Agassiz and Baird, no more botanists 
 such as Gray, and that the place which such men filled in the 
 community will be supplied by combinations of a number of 
 specialists, each of whom knows, with more minuteness, limited 
 portions of the subjects grasped bodily by the masters of the last 
 generation. It may be that the use of the word naturalist is to 
 became an anachronism, and that we are all destined to become, 
 generically biologists, and, specifically, morphologists, histologists, 
 embryologists, physiologists, or, it may be, cetologists, chirop- 
 terologists, oologists, carcinologists, ophiologists, helmintholo- 
 gists, actinologists, coleopterists, caricoologists, mycologists, 
 muscologists, bacteriologists, diatomologists, paleo-botanists, crys- 
 tallographers, petrologists, and the like. 
 
 I can but believe, however, that it is the duty of every sci- 
 entific scholar, however minute his specialty, to resist in himself, 
 and in the professional circles which surround him, the tendency 
 toward narrowing technicality in thought and sympathy, and 
 above all in the education of non-professional students. 
 
 I cannot resist the feeling that American men of science are 
 in a large degree responsible if their fellow-citizens are not 
 fully awake to the claims of scientific endeavor in their midst. 
 
94 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
 
 I am not in sympathy with those who feel that their dignity 
 is lowered when their investigations lead toward improvement 
 in the physical condition of mankind, but I feel that the highest 
 function of science is to minister to their mental and moral wel- 
 fare. Here in the United States, more than in any other country, 
 it is necessary that sound, accurate knowledge and a scientific 
 manner of thought should exist among the people, and the man 
 of science is becoming, more than ever, the natural custodian of 
 the treasured knowledge of the world. To him, above all oth- 
 ers, falls the duty of organizing and maintaining the institutions 
 for the diffusion of knowledge, many of which have been spoken 
 of in these addresses the schools, the museums, the expositions, 
 the societies, the periodicals. To him, more than to any other 
 American, should be made familiar the words of President 
 Washington in his farewell address to the American people : 
 
 "PROMOTE, THEN, AS AN OBJECT or PRIMARY IMPORTANCE, 
 
 INSTITUTIONS FOR THE GENERAL DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 IN PROPORTION AS THE STRUCTURE OF A GOVERNMENT GIVES 
 FORCE TO PUBLIC OPINIONS IT SHOULD BE ENLIGHTENED.