American Science in the Age of Jefferson Author:John C. Greene In May, 1804 Meriweather Lewis and William Clark and their company of explorers began their ascent of the Missouri River in accordance with President Thomas Jefferson's instructions for exploring the geography, minerals, flora and fauna, and native inhabitants of the newly acquired Louisiana territory and regions beyond to the Pacific Ocean in h... more »opes of finding, if possible, a water route to that body of water. Much has been written about that famous expedition and about Thomas Jefferson's scientific in the early national period (1780-1830) is John Greene's long out-of-print, profusely illustrated American Science in the Age of Jefferson.
Throughout the book we Jefferson at work as a facilitator and promoter of the sciences not only as the architect of the Lewis and Clark expedition but also his Notes on the State of Virginia, which became the model for numerous state and regional civil and natural histories, in his role launching the American Philosophical Society (of which he was president 1799-1815) on its way to making Philadelphia the center of vertebrate paleontology in the 19th century, in his leadership in collecting and comparing Indian vocabularies, a project carried to scientific conclusion by Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin in his "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America" (1836), and in countless other ways.
In the sciences of man - physical anthropology, archaeology, and comparative linguistics - the religious and racial contexts of early American science, never far beneath the surface of attention, showed forth with especial clarity.« less