In most of its leading characteristics -patriotism; utilitarianism; antitheoretical bent; fascination with the geography, flora, and fauna of the North American continent; and interest in the relations of science, politics, and religion -American science found an appropriate spokesman and symbol in Thomas Jefferson. Like Francis Bacon, whom he admired greatly, Jefferson took all knowledge for his province. His interest in science went well beyond acquiring the smattering expected of a gentleman in those days. While he was in Paris as American minister to France, he visited private cabinets and royal collections and sought out such promi- 

nent figures in natural history as the Count de Buffon, the anatomist J. M. L. Daubenton, and the botanist André Thouin, with all of whom he subsequently corresponded. In his outings along the Potomac River "he would climb rocks, or wade through swamps to obtain any plant he discovered or desired and seldom returned from these excursions without a variety of specimens."³⁹ His knowledge of the various departments of natural history, especially botany and zoology, was, said Benjamin S. Barton, "equalled by that of few persons in the United States." His acquaintance with astronomy and natural philosophy was such that Andrew Ellicott deemed him "more capable than any other gentleman of my acquaintance" of judging the merit of Ellicott's astronomical and geographical observations during the survey of the southern boundary of the United States. Jefferson was his own weather bureau before such facilities existed, keeping daily records of temperature, wind, and rainfall. He investigated and collected the plants of Virginia and compiled his own list of its birds, using the works of Linnaeus, Mark Catesby, and Buffon. He also gathered information about the Indian tribes of North America, with special reference to their languages, and excavated an Indian mound near Monticello.

In 1780-1781 Jefferson brought this and much other information together in his one and only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, written ... in answer to certain queries ... respecting its boundaries, rivers, sea ports, mountains, cascades and caverns, productions, mineral, vegetable and animal, climate, population, military force, marine force, aborigines, counties and towns, constitution, laws, college, buildings and roads, proceedings as to Tories, religion, manners, manufactures, subjects of commerce, weights, measures and money, public revenue and expenses, histories, memorials, and state papers, which set the tone and foreshadowed the content of much of American science for the next three decades. It provided a preview of things to come. It will be worthwhile, therefore, to examine some of the arguments of the Notes, comparing them with the characteristics of early American science already described and with the ideas and attitudes reflected in Jefferson's other writings.

The patriotic sensitivity of Americans with respect to everything connected with the New World is nowhere better illustrated than in Jefferson's refutation in his Notes of the confident assertions about the degeneracy of nature's productions on the American continent contained in the thirty-six volume Natural History, General and Particular of the celebrated Count de Buffon, Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes and Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Paris. Buffon was a man of wide knowledge and great scientific imagination, one of the early foreshadowers of the theory of organic evolution. In particular, he was interested in the nature, stability, and distribution of animal species. As 

specimens of the quadrupeds of the Old and New Worlds accumulated at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History and were dissected by Buffon's anatomist, Jean Marie L. Daubenton, Buffon compared the animals of the eastern and western hemispheres. He attempted to explain their similarities and differences by supposing that the New World was geologically younger than the Old World and that animals from the latter had migrated to America and had there degenerated in size and vigor owing to the influence of a different climate, topography, and diet. The European inhabitants of the New World were infuriated by this invidious comparison and tried in every way to refute it.

Among the various champions of the honor of American animals, none was better equipped to meet Buffon's challenge than Thomas Jefferson. He had an ardent sense of patriotism, a passion for collecting facts, and a mania for measurement. He measured all kinds of things: the trunks of trees, the height of mules, the weight of peas and strawberries grown on his plantation, the time it took a workman to fill a wheelbarrow and roll it thirty yards, the time it took a stone dropped in the fountain at Nîmes to reach the bottom of the pool, the dimensions of the arches in the amphitheater at Arles, the size of the Roman bricks in the Bordeaux circus, how long it took to pass through the locks at Bézieres, even the time it took to dig the grave of his deceased friend Dabney Carter.

Small wonder, then, that Jefferson was able to refute Buffon's allegations about the size of American animals. Presenting in tabular form his "Comparative View of the Quadrupeds of Europe and America," Jefferson was able to show that, whether one considered the quadrupeds common to both continents or those peculiar to each, the American animals came off very well both as to numbers and weight.⁴⁰ On being appointed minister to France, Jefferson carried the argument directly to the aged Buffon in Paris, taking with him an unusually large panther skin he had bought in a hatter's shop in Philadelphia. On receiving this gift and a copy of Jefferson's Notes, Buffon invited Jefferson to enjoy his hospitality at the Jardin des Plantes and later at his country estate at Montbard, where Jefferson found him "a man of extraordinary powers in conversation." Jefferson was then in his forties, a tall vigorous man known throughout Europe as the author of the bold and eloquent Declaration of Independence. Buffon was in his seventies, "a handsome figure, noble and calm," with quick black eyes beneath white hair curled in ringlets and tied at the back. The count was properly impressed by Jefferson's proofs of nature's power and vigor in the New World, which included the skin and bones of a moose Jefferson had procured from New Hampshire at great personal expense, and promised to make his apologies to the partisans of the American continent in the next volume of his Natural History, but he died before he could do so.⁴¹

The antitheoretical bent of Jefferson's mind and of American science generally in his day is reflected in his Notes. Consider, for example, his discussion of the problem of explaining the presence of marine fossils in strata high in the mountains and far from the ocean. If these fossils were genuine organic remains (he was half inclined to believe that they had been formed by "calcareous juices"), Jefferson was sure that they had not been placed there by Noah's flood. He likewise rejected the theory that the fossil-bearing strata had been formed at the bottom of the ocean and had then been elevated to their present locations. No known forces of nature, he declared, could have raised the Andes from the sea in one mighty upheaval. Since none of the available theories could account for the facts, it was best to have no theory at all: "It is always better to have no ideas than false ones."⁴²

In general, Jefferson had no use for the "theories of the earth" that proliferated in the eighteenth century and eventually gave rise to scien- 

tific geology. Mineralogy was a science of practical use in exploring and exploiting nature's mineral resources, he acknowledged, but "the dreams about the modes of creation, inquiries whether our globe has been formed by the agency of fire and water, how many millions of years it has cost Vulcan or Neptune to produce what the fiat of the Creator would effect by a single act of will, is too idle to be worth a single hour of any man's life."^43> This in 1826 when the science of geology was firmly established! Jefferson was equally conservative in his views about the fixity of species, a scientific dogma that had been challenged by Buffort and was soon to be entirely rejected by Erasmus Darwin and J. B. de Lamarck.

Jefferson scoffed at Buffon's suggestion that the similarity with a difference between the quadrupeds of the Old World and those of the New World could be explained by migration and gradual organic modification through the influence of climate, diet, and other environmental factors. "All the manna of heaven cannot change the mouse into a mammoth," Jefferson declared. In the same way he dismissed the idea that any species could ever become extinct. Like most of his contemporaries, Jefferson thought the extinction of species inconceivable: "For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things would vanish piecemeal."⁴⁴ In his Notes Jefferson applied this reasoning to the giant creature (the American mastodon) whose bones and teeth had been found at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, and in 1799 he invoked the same argument with reference to the huge clawed animal whose remains he had procured from a cave in western Virginia (see Chap. 11). Unfortunately for Jefferson, 1799 was the year in which Cuvier began publishing a series of memoirs on extinct quadrupeds, proving beyond doubt that the earth had undergone a series of revolutions in its structure and animal inhabitants.

Jefferson's conservatism in scientific matters also extended to the innovations in nomenclature and classification that were being proposed in various sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Paris he lived virtually next door to innovators of this kind-Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, A. L. de Jussieu in botany, and the Abb6 Ha0y in mineralogy -but he opposed all these innovations. Concerning the new chemical nomenclature advocated by Lavoisier and his colleagues, Jefferson wrote home in July 1788:

It [chemistry] is yet indeed a mere embryon. Its principles are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. . . . The attempt therefore of Lavoisier to reform the chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms, and his string of sulfates, sulfites, and

sulfures may have served no other end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us. Accordingly it is not likely to be admitted generally.⁴⁵

Underlying Jefferson's antipathy to scientific theorizing and innovations in nomenclature and classification was the spirit of utilitarianism so typical of eighteenth-century minds and American minds in particular. Dismissing geology as "too idle to be worth an hour of any man's life," Jefferson assigned botany a high rank among the sciences because plants furnished "the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower-borders, shade and perfume for our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies."⁴⁷ In chemistry and medicine, too, Jefferson valued the practical over the theoretical. "The common herd of philosophers," he complained to the author of a treatise on the uses of chemistry, "seem to write only for one another. The chemists have filled volumes on the composition of a thousand substances of no sort of importance to the purposes of life." Instead, they should apply their science "to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally."⁴⁸ As for medicine, Jefferson was more impressed by Edward Jenner's discovery of the cowpox vaccine for smallpox than by William Harvey's demonstration of the circulation of the blood. The latter, he conceded, was "a beautiful addition to our knowledge of the animal economy," but what had it done to improve the practice of medicine?

But if Jefferson was unimpressive as a scientist and unimaginative in his attitude toward innovation in science, he was unrivaled as a promoter of science; no other high public official in American history has been so strongly identified with that cause. After serving as vice-president, Jefferson was elected president of the American Philosophical Society in 1797 and continued in that office until 1815, contributing to the Transactions, serving on its committees, and enriching its collections with the bones 

of the mastodon and other extinct animals, specimens from the Lewis and Clark expedition, and historic documents such as the journals of that expedition and a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Just as Theodore Roosevelt dramatized the importance of conservation for the American public and John F. Kennedy the importance of the arts, so Jefferson dramatized the advancement of science. During his term as president distinguished foreign scientists came to visit him, among them Alexander von Humboldt and his botanical colleague Aimé Bonpland fresh from their scientific explorations in Latin America. The unfinished East Room of the White House was turned into a cabinet of natural history in which were displayed fossil bones from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. For a few months after the return of Zebulon Pike's expedition, two young grizzly bears could be seen on the White House lawn; they were later shipped to Peale's Museum in Philadelphia.

So pronounced was Jefferson's interest in science that his political opponents tried to use it against him, linking this zeal to his sympathy for the French Revolution and his "infidel" religious views. Filled with Federalist indignation against Jefferson and all his works, the young poet William C. Bryant (later a political liberal and defender of Andrew Jackson) apostrophized the "infidel" president as follows:

Go, wretch, resign the Presidential chair,
Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair--
Go, search with curious eye for horn&egrage;d frogs
'Mid the wild wastes of Louisiana bogs;
Or where the Ohio rolls his turbid stream,
Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme.⁴⁹

But Jefferson's services to science were not limited to giving it public recognition. He was ever active in collecting scientific information and getting it into the right hands. Having procured and described the remains of a hitherto unknown animal, the huge, clawed megalonyx, he deposited them with the American Philosophical Society and sent casts to Georges Cuvier in Paris. A few years later he commissioned William Clark to collect fossil bones at Big Bone Lick and divided the resulting collection between the society and the Museum of Natural History in Paris (see Chap. 11). He collected Indian vocabularies and made them available to scholars interested in comparative linguistics (see Chap. 14) and gave a detailed account of his excavation of an Indian mound located near Monticello (see Chap. 13). When Benjamin Waterhouse appealed to him for help in introducing Jenner's technique of vaccination for smallpox, Jefferson sent for some of the virus, persuaded Edward Gantt of Washington, D.C. to 

try it, and when it did not work, suggested to Waterhouse that he try shipping the next bottle of virus enclosed in a larger bottle of water. This batch proved effective, and Jefferson then tried the vaccine on his relatives and slaves at Monticello and encouraged other planters to do likewise. He even persuaded Chief Little Turtle and some of his braves to undergo vaccination and gave them some vaccine to take back to their tribe. From Monticello he shipped samples of the virus to Georgetown, Washington, Richmond, St. Petersburg, and Philadelphia. Later he provided some vaccine for the Lewis and Clark expedition.⁵⁰

Nor should we forget Jefferson's splendid library, rich in works of science, which became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. His collection of Linnaeus's works was, says the botanist-historian Joseph Ewan, "surely the largest private collection in America by 1815."⁵¹

Jefferson also furthered the progress of science by lending some government assistance in scientific enterprises. His role in this respect was ambivalent, however, for his principles of strict construction acted as a barrier to rapid development of government support for science. Jefferson opposed establishment of a national university, and when Peale invited the United States government to take charge of his famous museum, Jefferson replied that this would exceed the powers of the new government.

But Jefferson managed to do a good deal for science through the auspices of government despite his strict-construction principles. When Peale mounted an expedition to exhume a skeleton of the so-called mammoth, Jefferson offered the use of some army tents and a pump from a navy frigate. When the talented Swiss geodesist Ferdinand Hassler stressed the importance of establishing a coast survey, Jefferson found a place for him in the Treasury Department and supported his project in Congress. Above all, Jefferson conceived and engineered the Lewis and Clark expedition, the most dramatic American exploration to precede the Apollo I I moon shot and one that set the pattern for American exploring expeditions for a century to come. As the scientific results of the expedition became available, Jefferson made very effort to place the seeds, plants, minerals, and animals where they would be of maximum use to science (see Chap. 8). Thus, although Jefferson's contributions to the literature were modest and largely of the fact-gathering sort, he was keenly interested in all the sciences, highly knowledgeable about developments in most of them, convinced of their importance for the American experiment in republican government and human progress generally, and extraordinarily active in promoting them in every way he could, so much so that he became a national symbol of interest and faith in science. It seems appropriate, therefore, to designate his epoch in American science "The Age of Jefferson." 

There was still another way in which Jefferson influenced the development of early American science, however unintentionally. A staunch advocate of the southern interest in the political struggles of the 1790s, he helped to engineer the political compromise that resulted in moving the national capital from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. With this transfer it became apparent that the United States was not to have a capital in the European style, a city that was the political, economic, and cultural center of the nation. Philadelphia was on its way to becoming such a capital in the years before 1800 (see Chap. 2). But Washington, D.C., a raw new city on the banks of the Potomac, had no such potential. Although the city's population reached 10,000 by 1816, its residents were mostly diplomats and government employees, few of whom had more than a passing interest in science. Economy in government and strict construction of the Constitution were the watchwords of the Jeffersonian Republican administrations that guided the nation's destinies in the first quarter of the nineteenth century; proposals for establishing a national university, botanical garden, or national observatory at public expense received short shrift in the halls of Congress. Private efforts to found institutions for promoting science and its applications bore little fruit until after the War of 1812, when they gave rise to the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, the Washington Botanical Society (interested in a botanic garden), and the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. Congress granted the Columbian Institute a twenty-year charter and a small tract of land at the east end of the Mall for a botanical garden, but no funds to implement the project. The institute continued in existence until 1837, but it was unable to realize any of its ambitious plans for collecting and distributing information on plants, minerals, analyses of mineral waters, agricultural improvements, and topographical and statistical data. Not until the revival of the Coast Survey in the 1830s and the founding of the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Naval Observatory in the 1840s was the national capital to acquire institutions capable of supporting sustained scientific activity.⁵²

Lacking the energizing influence of a capital city on the model of London or Paris, American science developed regionally. Philadelphia continued as the leading scientific center for many years, but without hope of dominating the scientific scene as it had before 1800. In Boston, New Haven, New York, Charleston, Cincinnati, and Lexington the Philadelphia pattern of scientific institutions was copied with varying degrees of success. To what extent the champions of science in the nascent urban centers of the new republic succeeded in establishing a solid institutional base for scientific research will be seen in Chapters 2-5.

38. Thomas Jefferson to G. C. de La Coste, Washington, D.C., May 24,1807, as quoted in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 11:206-7.

39. See Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York, 1961), 13ff. See also Charles A. Browne, "Thomas Jefferson and the Scientific Trends of His Time," Chron. Bot., 8 (1944), 1-64; Harlow Shapley, "Notes on Thomas Jefferson as a Natural Philosopher," Proc. APS, 87 (1944), 274-76.

40. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 43-58.

41. For a picture of Buffon at his country estate in the 1780s see the translation of Jean Marie H. de S6chelles, Voyage à Montbard (Paris, 1801) in John Lyon and Phillip Sloan, From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), 357ff.

42. Jefferson, Notes, 31-33. See also Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 19 vols. (Princeton, 1950-), 8:565-66; (1954), 9:215-17 for the correspondence between Jefferson and David Rittenhouse about fossil shells.

43. Thomas Jefferson to John P. Emmett, Monticello, May 2, 1826, as quoted in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 16:171.

44. Thomas Jefferson, "A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia," Trans. APS, 4 (1799), 255-56.

45. Thomas Jefferson to James Currie, Paris, Dec. 20, 1788, Boyd, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 14:366.

46. Jefferson to John Manners, Monticello, Feb. 22, 1814, as quoted in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 14:97-99.

47. Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, Oct. 7, 1814, as quoted in Lipscomb, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 14:201.

48. Jefferson to Dr. Thomas Ewell, Monticello, Aug. 1805, as quoted in Ewell, Plain Discourses, 8-9.

49. William Cullen Bryant, The Embargo. Facsimile reproductions of the editions of 1808 and 1809, with an Introduction and Notes by Thomas 0. Mabbott (Gainesville, Fla., 1955), 40.

50. See Robert A. Halsey, How the President Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse Established Vaccination as a Public Health Procedure (New York, 1936). See also John B. Blake, Benjamin Waterhouse and the Introduction of Vaccination: A Reappraisal (Philadelphia, 1957).

51. Joseph E. Ewan, "How Many Botany Books Did Thomas Jefferson Own?" Bull. Mo. Bot. Gard. (June 1976), 1; Emily M. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1952), vols. 1, 2.

52. See Richard Rathbun, The Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences . . ., Smithsonian Institution U. S. National Museum bull. 10 1 (Washington, D. C., 1917); G. Brown Goode, The Origin of the National Scientific and Educational Institutions of the United States (New York and London, 1890). The Columbian Institute was chartered by Congress in 1818 for a term of twenty years and empowered to "procure ... a suitable building for the sittings of the said institution, and for the preservation and safe-keeping of a library and museum; and, also, a tract or parcel of land, for a botanic garden ...... It held its meetings successively in Blodget's Hotel, the Treasury Department, and City Hall until it was granted a "permanent" home in the western addition to the Capitol building in 1824. The chief organizers were Edward Cutbush, a surgeon in the U.S. Navy, and Thomas Law, a real estate dealer of English origins. The membership, which reached a total of 70 in 1826, consisted of government officials and employees, most of whom were not very active in the institute. A total of 85 communications were read during the institute's existence. Forty-four of these were contributed by William Lambert, a clerk in the Pension Office who was an amateur astronomer interested in determinations of latitude and longitude. In 1821 Lambert was selected by the secretary of state to make observations for determining the meridian of Washington. His proposal for establishing a national observatory in Washington was endorsed by the institute but failed to win congressional approval. Papers other than those contributed by Lambert concerned meteorological observations, improvements in shipbuilding, the plants of the District of Columbia, and monetary subjects. Work on the botanic 

garden began in 1821. By the end of 1823 the tract of land granted by Congress had been drained and leveled, an elliptical pond with an island at its center constructed, and four graveled walks laid out. Trees and shrubs were planted, and the garden was maintained as well as scanty funds would permit until the institute expired in 1837, one year before the termination of its charter. By an odd coincidence the very tract of land the garden occupied is presently the site of the United States Botanic Garden, established thirteen years after the demise of the institute. The idea of establishing a botanic garden in Washington was also supported by the Washington Botanical Society, organized in 1817, many of whose members were also members of the Columbian Institute, but this society lasted only until 1826. Rathbun's Columbian Institute, 75-77, includes a brief account of the society.