Although J. Stephen Catlett's long-awaited New Guide to the Collections in the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: APS, 1987) reached print only in the late stages of my research, it has saved me much time and effort.

The first state surveys were thus utilitarian affairs concerned with economic geology, though often yielding collections of specimens for a "state cabinet" of rocks and minerals. But it was one thing to employ scientists, another to keep them to their assigned task. Though publicly they responded with enthusiasm to the mandate for utility, within a remarkably short time the state surveys ceased to be merely useful ventures and developed into natural history surveys. As early as 1833 the annual report for the survey of Massachusetts devoted 430 pages to 'scientific geology," 99 pages to a catalogue of the animals and plants of the state, and a mere 72 to "economical geology." Three years later the legislature of New York boldly cast off the mask and unanimously appropriated $104,000 for a survey "which would furnish a perfect and scientific account" of rocks, soils, minerals, plants, and animals, as well as specimens for a state museum.1 The thirtieth and final quarto volume of the survey's scientific account appeared sixty-one years later.

Amateur naturalists had ideas of their own about opportunity and found in government patronage the means to scientific training and the chance to live by their calling. Decades before American colleges were capable of taking over the function, the surveys and explorations served as graduate schools and started many, often at a remarkably youthful age, on careers in science. James Hall, whose career was to be one of the most distinguished the state surveys launched, was twenty-five when he joined the New York survey. He joined for life. Eben Horsford, who would distinguish himself as Harvard's Rumford Professor of Chemistry, was eighteen. J.P. Lesley signed up with the Pennsylvania survey at twenty-one. James Dwight Dana, who would become the country's foremost geologist, received appointment to the U.S. Exploring Expedition at twenty-three; the philologist Horatio Hale was twenty-one when its scientific corps was made up. It was a young man's game, and Gerard Troost, taking command of the Tennessee survey at age fifty-five, was an oddity. Young men in a young science in a country itself young, the geologists became the first professionals in American science.

What above all they perceived in the surveys and explorations was the opportunity to satisfy their scientific curiosity and by so doing to advance their science, and by that the reputation of all American science. Though evangelists for utility when before the public, for the most part they preferred fossils to ore. It was curiosity, not the temptation of riches -- ever plucking at the sleeve of the geologist -- that drove Leo Lesquereux, stone deaf, to participate in eight explorations and surveys; the spastic Adolphus Heerman to take to the field with the Pacific Railroad surveys; and the consumptive William Baldwin to join the Long Expedition, on which he died. Curiosity drowned J.L. Berlandier in a tributary of the Rio Grande, Douglas Houghton in a snowstorm on Lake Superior, Elisha Mitchell on North Carolina's Black Dome, Ithamar Crawe in a New York lake, and took the lives of Frederick Kreutzfeldt and the Kern brothers in Indian massacres.

Still, shared curiosity made of them no band of brothers. "The longer I live in America," wrote the Swiss-born Lesquereux, "the more I am offended about the jealousy of... your scientific men. Every one of them, with a few exceptions, is looking to his brother in science like to a foe whom he has to crush before he can ascend a higher step." 2 And indeed, exploring scientists quarreled bitterly over available academic and government appointments, priority of discovery, and interpretation of phenomena. But in a society that worshiped utility, the geologists' lack of concern for the merely useful set them apart and made them the founders of the first national community of scientists, the American Association of Geologists and Naturalists, which in turn became the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In view of the spirit displayed in its founding, that organization might as aptly have been called the Association for the Advancement of American Science, for what the scientists shared with the public that paid them was cultural patriotism. In their determination to upgrade American science in world opinion, personal and national ambition met. When, as head of the federal survey of the mineral lands of Michigan, the Boston geologist Charles T. Jackson lobbied Congress to defeat an attempt by state chauvinists that would have required him to employ only citizens of Michigan-"practical" citizens versed in woodcraft, at that-and himself to join their ranks, he was lobbying for science and for the reputation of American science. But chauvinism was not confined to state boosters. As cultural patriots, scientific investigators early staked out the continent for American science and so accorded a cool reception to the accomplished English geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh, who finally returned home in disgust with republican society. James Hall suspected ulterior motives in Sir Charles Lyell's American visit.

With the sailing of the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, American science proceeded to stake out the rest of the globe as well. Designed to show a skeptical world what the egalitarian republic could accomplish in science, the expedition's scientific corps was to be exclusively American and its members alone to write up the nineteen volumes of scientific reports. Skeptics were duly impressed at the magnitude of the American effort, but theirs was not the only revelation. The task of classifying and describing the tons of specimens gathered in the course of the four-year cruise displayed in a spectacular way the inadequacy of the amateur naturalist and the inability of American science to supply the specialists the collections demanded. Thereafter, as is evident in the personnel of succeeding surveys and explorations, xenophobia evaporated rapidly, no doubt owing in good part to the galaxy of scientific talent that arrived in flight from revolutionary Germany or in the wake of Louis Agassiz.

As government patronage made professionals in science, so the increasing sophistication of the surveys speeded specialization. The manuscript collections described here render its implacable advance, ever deplored, startlingly evident. The first of the state surveys involved only geology, and economic geology at that. But soon the chemist was wanted to determine the composition of marl, the entomologist to identify the pests that depleted crops. Mineralogists, microscopists, mammalogists, ornithologists, paleontologists, and an assortment of specialists in botany came hurrying after until, by the close of the period covered here, that hero of an earlier day, the all-round naturalist, had come to be regarded as something of a relic, still useful as a collector in the field for the laboratory specialist, but not a serious scientist. By the same token and excepting the geologists, an increasing number of the serious never ventured into the field.

When in 1838, the year that saw the launching of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, Congress legislated into existence the army's Corps of Topographical Engineers, federal participation in science came to supplement that of the states. Though the Corps carried out several explorations before the Mexican War, its most important work lay in the Far West, the territory that Jefferson had assumed the nation would one day embrace when he dispatched Lewis and Clark. In the survey of the Mexican Boundary and the Pacific Railroad Surveys, the Corps performed what its historian has called "one of the most rapid and complete inventories ever made of any portion of the globe.... American abundance was never better expressed than in the tidal wave of specimens of rocks and plants and animals that were thrust upon the scientists from out of the western wilderness." 3 For natural history, that wave was the wave of the future.

Having pursued a special course of study at West Point, the officers of the Corps were themselves scientists of a sort, some to become members of the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences, and later even of the National Academy of Sciences. Unhappily, they are underrepresented in these collections. The letters of the civilian scientists who accompanied the engineers, many of them past or present participants in the state surveys, suggest that relations between military and civilian, if not unfailingly happy, singularly lacked the bitterness that marred the U.S. Exploring Expedition. Even the commander most respectful of science had on occasion to caution the civilian to refrain from relaying news of discoveries to colleagues back east until Congress could publish them, or to put his report into language members of Congress could understand. Yet many, confronted like Captain Howard Stansbury with the task of chronicling their labors for government publication, genuinely felt and generously acknowledged their gratitude to scientific companions who gathered rocks and plants and insects and reported on matters often beyond the competence their own West Point training conferred.

All evidence suggests that whatever tales might reach him of army officers contemptuous of science, the field investigator prized the opportunity to join the Corps' expeditions into the West, even as "scientific hitchhikers," as one historian has labeled those who, simply in the hope of finding new plants or insects or fishes, went along at their own expense. Some were themselves army officers of scientific bent on leave from their regiments. 4

The sixty years' accumulation of personal letters, journals, and diaries, sketches of landscapes and antelopes, and lists of apparatus and supplies represented here bears witness to the transformation of science in America from the amateur gathering seashells in spare moments, to the professional; from the naturalist to the specialist; from small, local, and generally impoverished societies to national organizations; from modest state enterprises to great federal institutions of science. The transformation went a long way toward winning from a skeptical world, whose literate still could appreciate an Asa Gray as well as an Emerson, a certain esteem for the novel republic that produced them.