The founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1812 and its Journal in 1817

Abstract

In America, 1812 was an auspicious year in which found Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia-today oldest extant scientific institution in Western Hemisphere-because war against Great Britain, declared in June of that year, marked true beginning of American self-reliance. And this autonomy would be felt nowhere more strongly than in realm of natural science. Alexander Wilson, a Scottish immigrant who wrote and illustrated first book on American birds, railed against reproach of obliged apply Europe for an account and description of productions of our own (Wilson 1808, 13:3, reprint 1876). Wilson probably had in mind plants collected by John and William Bartram. Philadelphia, Wilson's home for many years, was a cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and democratic city that, in 18th century, had been called the Athens of America.' Such institutions as American Philosophical Society, New World's counterpart of Royal Society of London, and Benjamin Franklin's Library Company, first subscription library in United States, listed country's most eminent intellectuals among their members. The Pennsylvania Hospital was first of its kind in America, and College of Philadelphia (by 1812, University of Pennsylvania) had conferred first American medical degrees in 1768. A busy seaport at hub of commerce, Philadelphia was also center for artists and sculptors who displayed their works at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. And Charles Willson Peale's museum contained not only portraits of famous Americans, but exhibits of natural and physical sciences. Philadelphia was ideal milieu in which found new institution. The seven founders2 of Academy of Natural Sciences, a doctor, a distiller, a chemist-the mineralogist Gerard Troost-and several apothecaries, among them Thomas Say (Fig. 1), who would found sciences of entomology and conchology in America, were from as many different national backgrounds: English, Irish, French, and Dutch. They were all friends who decided formalize their meetings by establishing a society to occupy their leisure, in each other's company, on subjects of natural science, interesting and useful country and world, with primary object the advancement and diffusion of useful, liberal human knowledge.3 Rooms were rented above a milliner's shop at 94 North Second Street as conversation hall, reading room, and a place deposit collections of specimens. The members agreed that society would be perpetually exclusive of political, religious and national partialities, antipathies, preventions and prejudices as adverse to interests of Science.4 Political issues, both national and international, were particularly controversial with country at war. But religious questions were no less problematic since many naturalists on both sides of Atlantic, having for most part abandoned great chain of being theory, had yet replace with satisfactory answers. Thomas Jefferson believed that mastodon still roamed western plains. In his view was impossible for one of God's creatures become extinct. One of leading French savants, Georges Cuvier, held that under God's will species were periodically wiped out by catastrophes and replaced by new and improved species (Bruce 1987:107). While Jean de Lamarck had suggested, that struggle cope with changing environment induced physical changes in individual creatures whose offspring then inherited them, thus developing better-adapted species (Bruce 1987:123). In any case, as historian George H. Daniels observes, it is