The National Academy of Sciences The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1. The Academy's Antecedents
1. The Academy's Antecedents
Pages 1-15
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
Five men, possibly six, are said to have presided over the genesis of the Academy; few others among the fifty individuals named as incorporators were even aware that its founding was imminent. The antecedents of the new organization in American science were the national academies in Great Britain and on the Continent, whose membership included the principal men of science of the realm.
|
From page 2... ...
Nevertheless, it shared with the scientific societies and academies abroad their heritage from the seventeenth century the century of genius that had called forth Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Christian Huygens, Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Benedict de Spinoza, and Wilhelm von Leibniz;2 the century that witnessed the development of the telescope, microscope, and pendulum, the thermometer, barometer, and air pump, as well as calculus and the calculating machine. The institutions from which the National Academy of Sciences derives constitute distinguished antecedents.
|
From page 3... ...
, John Evelyn, makes innumerable references to the Society in his famous Kalendar~um, including his own election on August 20, ~66~: "I was this day admitted, & then Sworne one of the present Council of the Royal Society, being nominated in his Majesties Original Graunt, to be of this first Council, for the regulation of Ethel Society, & making of such Laws & statutes as were conducible to its establishment & progresse: for which we now set a part every Wednesday morning, 'till they were all finished."6 A second royal antecedent was the Academie Royale des Sciences, established in Paris in ~666, enjoying both the patronage and the financial support of Louis XIV. The French Academy also had had its origins in a small group, formed about two decades earlier, which included Pierre Gassendi, Rene Descartes, and Blaise Pascal and his father, Etienne.7 In Germany, it was Wilhelm von Leibniz who led the effort for an academy.
|
From page 4... ...
The new science that was to transform the modern world arose out of the search for a method of investigation that would produce true and useful knowledge about man and his world. It had been going on for a century when Francis Bacon set down his method for the pursuit of scientific truth by observation and experimentation and declared that pursuit inseparable from the improvement of the human condition.
|
From page 5... ...
12 By then the energies of the merchants, manufacturers, planters, artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics had brought a measure of wealth and, more important, of leisure, enabling many of them to join the professional men the ministers, educators, lawyers, and physicians in the pursuit of science. The American Philosophical Society On the assumption that "the first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies · twas now ~ pretty well over," a joint plan issued from Benjamin ~~ William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon Their History (London: J
|
From page 6... ...
In ~767-~768, however, the American Philosophical Society was revived around the self-taught astronomer David Rittenhouse. At the time, Franklin was not only abroad but had recently been elected president of a rival group, "The American Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting and Propagating Useful Knowledge."~4 In ~769 the American Philosophical Society doubled its membership to more than two hundred and fifty resident and corresponding fellows by absorbing the whole of the "American Society," including Franklin, who was to be its President to the end of his life.
|
From page 7... ...
Inspired by the auguries of liberty and independence and avowedly modeled on the Academy in Paris, it had been founded, as the merchant James Bowdoin in his opening address as President of the Academy declared, to promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities of America, and of the natural history of the country; and to determine the uses to which its various natural productions may be applied; to promote and encourage medical discoveries; mathematical disquisitions; philosophical enquiries and experiments; improvements in agriculture, arts, manufactures and commerce; and, in fine, to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest.
|
From page 8... ...
, and the Medico and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland (~7991.~9 One of the most famous of the early medical societies, and one that endures to the present day, is the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, established in ~787. Its founding members were: John Redman, John Jones, William Shippen, jr., Benjamin Rush, Samuel Duffield, James Hutchinson, Abraham Chovet, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, Gerandus Clarkson, Thomas Parke, George Glentworth, and thirteen junior fellows.
|
From page 9... ...
Its objectives, as set forth in its constitution, reflect an interesting awareness of health problems indigenous to this country: To advance the science of medicine, and thereby lessen human misery by investigating the diseases and remedies that are peculiar to our country, by observing the effects of different seasons, climates and situations upon the human body, by recording the changes that are produced in diseases by the progress of agriculture, arts, population, and manners, by searching for medicines in our woods, waters, and the bowels of the Earth....20 Like learned societies in other fields, the College of Physicians aspired to the publication of its Transactions, which in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an important means of communicating technical information, "because it was .
|
From page 10... ...
To the new capital also came the issue of federal responsibility for promoting institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.22 The greatest concern centered on the establishment under the patronage of Congress of a national university that would afford, as Benjamin Rush said, advanced instruction in government and history, the practical arts and sciences, and "everything else connected with the advancement of republican knowledge and principles."23 The founding of such an institution, sought by Washington as far back as ~ 775, proposed by James Madison and Charles Pinckney at the Constitutional Convention of ~787, urged in Jefferson's annual message to Congress In ~806, elaborated by poet-statesmen Joel Barlow in his plan for a national institution that same year, and revived periodically over the next three decades, failed repeatedly because the states resisted the idea of granting so specific a power to the central government. All that was achieved in the field of science at the Convention of ~787 was to grant Congress authority to establish a mint, fix the standards of weights and measures, and "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; .
|
From page 11... ...
In ~8~5, John Quincy Adams, the last in the succession of patrician presidents with strong inclinations toward science, declared in his first annual message to Congress that it had a constitutional obligation to create a national university and called for a national observatory, a naval academy corresponding to West Point, and a new executive department to plan and supervise scientific activities in the government.24 The violent reaction of the Congress placed in jeopardy during Adams's term even the few scientific offices it had activated. The intellectual and scientific center that Washington and Jefferson had envisioned in the nation's capital did not begin to emerge until after the founding of the Smithsonian Institution almost a quarter of a century later.25 The Columbian Institute An early attempt to create a learned society in Washington was the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, which had begun life in the spring of ~6 as the Metropolitan Society.
|
From page 12... ...
Among its resident members were Andrew Johnson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Richard Rush, and Joel R Poinsett; and among its correspondents, Nathaniel Bowditch of Boston, the Harvard historian Jared Sparks, lexicographer Noah Webster, Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (then liv26 Richard Rathbun, The Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences: A Washington Society of 1816-1838, which Established a Museum and Botanic Garden under Government Patronage, in U.S.
|
From page 13... ...
suggested to Poinsett a strong possibility that it might well be settled on an established organization of scientific activity in Washington. In May ~840, with encouraging prospects, Poinsett and some eight of his friends in the government service formed the National Institution (later Institute)
|
From page 14... ...
It blazed briefly in April ~ 844, when it sponsored the first national scientific congress in this country, but its failure to enlist the participation of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists signaled the end of the Institute. In ~842 the Institute had issued a circular announcing plans for the congress and inviting, among others, the American Philosophical Society and the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists to attend.
|
From page 15... ...
President John Tyler made the opening address, and Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey led off the forty-two papers with remarks "On the condition of science in the United States and Europe," regrettably never published. But the real purpose of the gathering was to present to the Congress a united appeal for funds for the National Institute, in particular, the Smithson bequest.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.