Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One 1800–1846 Naturals and Naturalists
- Part Two 1846–1876 Warriors
- Part Three 1876–1900 Scientists
- Part Three Introduction
- “The Fixation of Belief” (excerpt), Popular Science Monthly (1877)
- “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (excerpt) Popular Science Monthly (1878)
- “Catastrophism and Evolution” (excerpt), The American Naturalist (1877)
- “The Spectrum of an Argand Burner,” Science (1883)
- “The New Astronomy. I. Spots on the Sun” (excerpt), The Century (1885)
- “Screw,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 21, 9th edition (1875–1889)
- “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether,” American Journal of Science (1887)
- “The Lake as a Microcosm” (excerpt), Bulletin of the Peoria Scientific Association (1887)
- “Laws of Temperature Control of the Geographic Distribution of Terrestrial Animals and Plants,” National Geographic Magazine (1894)
- “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan” (excerpt), Botanical Gazette (1899)
- “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, abstract,” American Journal of Science and Arts (1878)
- Bibliography
Part Three Introduction
from Part Three - 1876–1900 Scientists
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One 1800–1846 Naturals and Naturalists
- Part Two 1846–1876 Warriors
- Part Three 1876–1900 Scientists
- Part Three Introduction
- “The Fixation of Belief” (excerpt), Popular Science Monthly (1877)
- “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (excerpt) Popular Science Monthly (1878)
- “Catastrophism and Evolution” (excerpt), The American Naturalist (1877)
- “The Spectrum of an Argand Burner,” Science (1883)
- “The New Astronomy. I. Spots on the Sun” (excerpt), The Century (1885)
- “Screw,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 21, 9th edition (1875–1889)
- “On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether,” American Journal of Science (1887)
- “The Lake as a Microcosm” (excerpt), Bulletin of the Peoria Scientific Association (1887)
- “Laws of Temperature Control of the Geographic Distribution of Terrestrial Animals and Plants,” National Geographic Magazine (1894)
- “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan” (excerpt), Botanical Gazette (1899)
- “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, abstract,” American Journal of Science and Arts (1878)
- Bibliography
Summary
Diversity and Differentiation
In 1876 Simon Newcomb (an American polymath who published in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and economics) wrote an essay, “Abstract Science in America, 1776–1876,” for an issue of the North American Review dedicated to the centennial of the American Revolution. The essay provides a recap of American science – clear, concise, contemporary – and a view of what contemporaries thought about the state of American science:
[W]e require no increase in the number of our museums, observatories, or laboratories during the present generation. … We are deficient in the number of men actively devoted to scientific research of the higher types, in public recognition of the labors of those who are so engaged, in the machinery for making the public acquainted with their labors and their wants, and in the pecuniary means for publishing their researches. Each of these deficiencies is, to a certain extent, both a cause and an effect of the others. … The supply of any one of these deficiencies would, to a certain extent, remedy all the others. … In other intellectual nations, science has a fostering mother, – in Germany the universities, in France the government, in England the scientific societies; and if science could find one here, it would speedily flourish. The only one it can look to here is the educated public; and if that public would find some way of expressing in a public and official manner its generous appreciation of the labors of American investigators, we should have the best entering wedge for supplying all the wants of our science. (p. 118)
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- An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Science Writing , pp. 201 - 208Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012