Prologue

H E D E v E LO PM E N T of American science during the early decades of T the nineteenth century has been customarily portrayed by historians as a steady accumulation of resources. Indicators of the gradual expansion of science in the United States have included, most typically, the establishment of scientific journals, the founding of specialist organizations, the creation of scientific schools in the major colleges, and the appearance of national organizations for the promotion and advancement of science. Not until the second half of the century did science become a consciously organized research activity; similarly the systematic intervention of the federal government in the support of science was only apparent after the Civil War.' That science, in the first half of the nineteenth century, won more adherents and found greater support among the literate classes is not a controversial proposition. Because the United States as a nation was itself inchoate and, in particular, because there was no one city that served simultaneously as the political, cultural, and financial center of the country, science flourished only in those few cities capable of providing intellectual activity with sustained support. In this sense the development of science during the period can be best understood through the use of a structure defined by the geography of the early American republic.