The Society for Useful Knowledge (12 page)

With the establishment of his colony, Penn served as a powerful conduit for this zeal for educational reform and practical learning from the Old World to the new one. In a “Letter to Wife and Children,” left behind for the edification of his family when he sailed for America in 1682, the Pennsylvania proprietor spelled out the essence of proper schooling: “Let it be useful knowledge such as is consistent with truth and godliness, not cherishing a vain conversation or idle mind.… Let my children be husbandmen and housewives; it is industrious, healthy, honest, and of good example.”
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As for ancient texts, rhetoric, and grammar—the stuff of a traditional English education—Penn shared Bacon's dismissive attitude and put the odds at “ten to one” to be of no use whatsoever.

Many of the Royal Society's most intransigent critics came from within the ranks of university professors, now purged of any sectarian leanings in the aftermath of the restoration of the monarchy. Those back in control of England's universities clearly recognized the threat to their authority and standing posed by any practical realization of Bacon's “New Philosophy” or by associated demands for educational reform.
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Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and vociferous defender of the London virtuosi, denounced the universities' criticism as little more than knee-jerk reliance on the outmoded thinking of the Ancients and a general unwillingness to embrace new experimental technologies, such as the microscope and other “Optic Glasses.” Glanvill even devoted a chapter of one of his works to “The Credit of Optic Glasses vindicated against a disputing man afraid to believe his own eyes against Aristotle.”
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Not-so-subtle issues of class and privilege also intruded, for Bacon and his supporters recognized the potential contributions to scientific endeavor of the amateur inventor, the artisan, the mechanic, or even the simple laborer, in what was a direct affront to the exalted position of the academic class. Robert Hooke, the first curator of experiments at the Royal Society, likewise emphasized the value of including the practical talents of merchants and other businessmen in the pursuit of useful knowledge: “Their attempts,” he argued, “will bring philosophy from words to action.”
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Locke, a fellow of the Royal Society since 1688, pointed out that the “Commonwealth of Learning” had room for all, not simply for the rare genius such as Newton. “It is Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Laborer in clearing the Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way of Knowledge.”
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Typical of this new thinking was the work of William Petty, a founding figure of the Royal Society and one-time personal secretary to Thomas Hobbes. Petty openly celebrated the artisan, the laborer, and the mechanic and contrasted them favorably with the elite universities' production of so many “Fustian and Unworthy Preachers in Divinity, so many pettifoggers in the Law, so many Quack-salvers in physic [medicine], so many Grammaticasters in Country-schools, and so many lazy men in Gentlemen's houses; when every man might learn to live otherwise in more plenty and honor.”
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One of Petty's reformist allies argued that men must “reject what is useless (as most of that which hath hitherto borne the name of learning, will upon impartial examination prove to be) and esteem that only which is evidently useful to the people.”
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The arduous Atlantic passage that transported the Puritans, Quakers, and other religious dissidents also carried the hopes and ambitions of the virtuosi that Francis Bacon's new science would produce a trove of curious discoveries in the New World. Prospects were buoyed by the fact that a number of the colonies were presided over by fellows of the Royal Society, such as William Penn or the Connecticut governor, John Winthrop the Younger. Yet like the early colonizers themselves, European notions of useful knowledge and experimental science, too, ran afoul of the demands of actual settlement, the slow and uncertain lines of communication across the vast ocean, and the trying matter of daily existence.

In 1667, the secretary of the Royal Society wrote to Winthrop, a colleague well versed in medicine and alchemy, to press for immediate implementation of the Society's scientific program. “Sir, I persuade myself that you … will make it a good part of your business to recommend this real Experimental way of acquiring knowledge, by conversing with, and searching into the works of God themselves.”
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Winthrop's response was a measured one. On an earlier visit to England, he had presented the Royal Society's first scientific paper from the colonies, on the manufacture of tar and pitch from New England pine, and he promoted North
American shipbuilding and the cultivation of Indian corn. Winthrop, whose father and namesake was the first governor of Massachusetts, also owned New England's first “Optic glass,” a ten-foot telescope, and later a smaller reflecting model.
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But now he had to concede that the practical challenges of life in the colony, even five decades after its founding, had largely overwhelmed the impulse for scientific inquiry. “Plantations in their beginnings have work enough, and find difficulties sufficient to settle a comfortable way of subsistence, there being buildings, fencings, clearing and breaking up of ground, lands to be attended, orchards to be planted, highways and bridges and fortifications to be made, and all things to do, as in the beginning of the world.”
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Such obstacles were exacerbated by the hostility of the virtuosi to the idea of homegrown American science. It was one thing for Royal Society veterans like Winthrop or Penn, both of whom went back and forth from Europe to America, to engage in the pursuit of useful knowledge in the New World. It was quite another for the colonies to produce their own scientists, or to otherwise threaten the European monopoly over the economy of knowledge. For the Royal Society, members of this tiny American vanguard were little more than helpmates in a global enterprise, best suited to the collection and description of the New World's plants, animals, and other wonders but ill prepared for the rigors of true natural philosophy. Europe was to remain the primary source of economic, political, and intellectual power.

The first serious native-born challenge to this monopoly on science issued from a remote farmhouse on the banks of the Schuylkill River, a dozen or so miles outside Philadelphia. There, the Quaker John Bartram—in his habitual wide trousers and large leather apron—quietly wrestled a living from the land and immersed himself in the medicinal properties of the plants that dotted the nearby forests and meadows. Visitors reported that Bartram carved the foundation for the family home out of solid rock—the structure stands to this day—and painstakingly drained the surrounding marshlands to reveal fertile soil for his crops and good grazing land for livestock. Particularly striking were Bartram's sophisticated use of fertilizer and practice of crop rotation in the wilds of Pennsylvania, as well as the well-ordered botanical garden he assembled by trial and error.

Bartram's grandfather had followed William Penn, his fellow Quaker, to the New World in 1682 and settled in Darby, just outside the young town of
Philadelphia. John was born there, on May 23, 1699, but his father, William, soon left his son in the care of the boy's grandparents and moved to the Carolinas after a series of run-ins with other members of the Darby Quaker meeting. Fiercely independent like his father, John, too, clashed with the religious opinions and social mores of his community throughout his lifetime. Yet he stayed put, affixing a sign above the door to his greenhouse reflecting both his steadfast nature and core beliefs: “Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through nature, up to nature's God.”
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Bartram was, by necessity as well as by inclination, largely self-taught. “Being born in a newly settled colony, of not more than fifty years' establishment, where the sciences of the Old Continent were little known, it cannot be supposed, that he could derive great advantages or assistance from school-learning or literature,” recalled his son, William. Besides, Bartram preferred to take matters into his own hands, generally to great effect. He absorbed what he could as a young boy from the modest local school, but as an adult he studied on his own, reading late into the night. When possible, he sought out “the society of the most learned and virtuous men.”
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Gradually, Bartram was drawn into the intellectual life of Philadelphia, where Enlightenment ideas of science and knowledge held sway. James Logan, colonial agent for William Penn and then the province's most learned resident, taught Bartram how to examine the fine details of his specimens under a microscope. Logan also helped Bartram with his study of Latin, then the international language of botany and other sciences, and allowed him to use his well-stocked library, a privilege Logan likewise granted to the young Franklin.
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A member of Franklin's Junto put Bartram in touch with the Royal Society of London, perennially on the lookout for North American agents to collect and ship back specimens of plants, animal pelts, fossils, and other “curiosities,” for study by the natural philosophers of England and the Continent.
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As a token of its esteem for Bartram's work, the Library Company of Pennsylvania waived the relatively high cost of membership and bestowed on him free access for life to their growing collection, which included a number of fine works on botany and natural history in general.

The Junto at one point took up a subscription to underwrite some of Bartram's botanizing expeditions, which took him farther and farther from home. A notice in Franklin's
Pennsylvania Gazette
to solicit contributions reminded
readers of the utility of such a project: “Botany, or the Science of Herbs and Plants, has always been accounted in every Country, as well by the Illiterate as by the Learned, an useful Study and Labor to Mankind, as it has furnished them with Cures for many Diseases, and their Gardens, Groves and Fields with rare and pleasant Fruits, Flowers, Aromatics, Shades, and Hedges.”
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Soon, Bartram was exploring the forests and mountains, ranging from Canada to Florida, and dispatching seeds, dried plants, and other items, all accompanied by written accounts of his adventures to aristocratic patrons—the king of England, among them—across the Atlantic.

Despite these successes, Bartram's relations with the European men of science were often difficult. He was easily provoked, sensitive to the smallest slight, and increasingly resentful of his assigned subsidiary role in their great project. The virtuosi treated Bartram and a handful of other colonial naturalists as little more than extensions of their own scientific will, ideal for carrying out explicit orders but incapable of any original work. They regularly flattered these agents in print, or named the odd discovery in their honor, but they had no intention of sharing the glory or allowing them to make their own scientific contributions. When a useful invention of early American provenance did surface, as was the case with the reflecting navigational quadrant created by Franklin's Junto partner Thomas Godfrey, the Royal Society hushed up word of the breakthrough and then awarded initial credit for a similar device to its own vice president.
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At the outset, Bartram seemed to harbor little ambition to enter the ranks of the virtuosi presided over by the European knowledge societies, and he never fully mastered the skills, idiom, or attitudes of Enlightenment science. Nor did he show much interest in experimentation, although he did perform several tests at the behest of the Royal Society to help confirm the sexual nature of plant reproduction. He also practiced plant hybridization.

This reticence may have stemmed, in part, from a lifelong sensitivity to his lack of formal education, a lack Bartram may have felt all the more acutely as he began to correspond with some of Europe's leading scientists. Among them was the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus, who in 1735 proposed a remarkably durable system for classifying and naming plants and animals by genus and species. “Good grammar and good spelling may please those that are more taken with a fine superficial flourish than real truth,” wrote Bartram to a contact in London, as he tried to turn his literary vices into scientific virtues.
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Whatever his educational shortcomings, real or imagined, Bartram clearly applied enormous intelligence, boundless energy, and strong powers of observation to the marching orders from members of the Royal Society, chiefly in the person of Peter Collinson, the London merchant. Bartram and Collinson never met but their steady correspondence across four decades bears witness to the latter's enormous influence over the man generally regarded as America's first botanist. In a tribute to Collinson after his death in 1768, one colleague wrote, “That eminent naturalist, JOHN BARTRAM, may almost be said to have been created such by my friend's assistance; he first recommended the collecting of seeds, and afterward assisted in the disposing of them in this country [England], and constantly excited him to persevere in investigating the plants of America.”
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Collinson's letters from England, beginning in the 1730s, include seemingly endless wish lists of seeds, cuttings, and dried leaves or other specimens, more often than not accompanied by a great deal of false modesty and a fair amount of wheedling: “I only mention these plants; not that I expect thee to send them. I don't expect or desire them, but as they happen to be found accidentally: and what is not to be met with one year, may be another.”
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He at first plied Bartram with presents in return for regular shipments of native American plants—a calico gown for Bartram's wife and some “odd little things” for the children.
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Only after some gentle grumbling from Bartram did the two put their working relationship on a firm business footing, with the American's increasingly arduous and expensive botanizing expeditions covered by regular stipends from Collinson and his circle of European scientists and gardening enthusiasts. By 1765, even the court of King George III helped fund Bartram's travels.