The National Academy of Sciences The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (1978) / Chapter Skim
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3. The Incorporation and Organization of the Academy
3. The Incorporation and Organization of the Academy
Pages 43-78
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From page 43... ...
Edward Lurie describes it as "a truly national 'American' university .
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Initially they were: Bache; Agassiz; Benjamin Peirce, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Harvard; Benjamin Gould, founder in ~849 of the Astronomical Journal and head of the longitude department of the Coast Survey from ~85z to ~867; and Cornelius C Felton, Harvard Professor of Greek and Latin, a close friend of Agassiz, and the only nonscientist.
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From page 45... ...
The series of debates on the Origin of Species at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston in January ~860 showed that the following were all receptive to or tolerant of the idea of evolution: the naturalist Dana (also corresponding with Darwin) , anatomist Joseph Leidy, geologist and paleontologist James Hall, Harvard zoologist Jeffries Wyman, and the geologist William Barton Rogers, who later became the first President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
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From page 46... ...
The original members of each section would then nominate a third for their section, who would be elected by the combined sections, "the 3 together to nominate a fourth and so on," until an agreed total membership was reached. How the original members were to be 5 The most prestigious honor of British science, the Copley Medal, awarded annually since ~73~, had been bestowed on Franklin in ~753.
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The Outbreak of the Civil War The fall of Fort Sumter on Sunday, April ~4, ~86~, may have aroused little reaction in far-away Cambridge, but it stunned the city of Washington. With its telegraph lines to the South cut, the city that week trembled at rumors that Gen.
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From page 48... ...
. Six months later the customary "whirl and roar of winter-life in Washington" was muted; field hospitals had been erected on the Mall, and Union soldiers were everywhere, constructing defense works on Capitol Hill, on City Hall hill with its Patent Office and Post Office, and around Executive Square.
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From page 49... ...
For notes dated March So, ~863, of published histories of those academies available in the Smithsonian library, see the bound register, "National Academy of Sciences, New York and Washington Meetings, ~863-'64," pp. 270-27~, in NAS Archives.
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The Permanent Commission Events were also moving in Washington, but in another direction, when in the second year of the war Bache was joined there by Charles Henry Davis, a naval officer who had been a student under Peirce at Harvard and astronomer in the Coast Survey under Hassler and Bache. In November ~862, after commanding gunboat operations on the Mississippi, he was recalled to Washington to head the Bureau of Navigation with its Naval Observatory, Hydrographic Office, and Nautical Almanac Office.
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Many of the more imaginative or technical ones had been sent to the Smithsonian, where Henry and Bache examined and reported on them.~4 Before long the numbers of projects and proposals meriting extended study required organization, and Bache and Davis contemplated the possibility of securing approval for an agency to handle this work that might later be elevated to national status. On February 2, ~863, Davis wrote home: "How much have I told you, if anything, about a Permanent Commission or Academy?
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From page 52... ...
Before them was a plan that had been drawn up by Charles Henry Davis, as well as one by Bache, and before the evening ended they had a draft of a bill ready for Congress "my plan amplified and improved," said Davis.~9 The drafted bill named fifty men of science chosen by the assembled group to be the incorporators of a National Academy of Sciences. Frederick True, an early historian of the Academy, surmised that "the little group of men that guided the Academy movement" may well have sat down that night with the membership lists, totaling, with duplications, over eleven hundred names, drawn from the American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to assist them in the selection of incorporators.
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From page 53... ...
This was its single stipulated function, its sole obligation. The extraordinary brevity of the bill of particulars, comprising six lines of type, in contrast to the twelve pages of the Royal Society's charter of ~663 and the fifty conditions of the French Academy, left the burden of interpretation to the incorporators and to members in future years.
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From page 54... ...
f ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~: r~''iSK ~~'~ ~ ~ ~ ~ my. '' ,,^ ~ ~ ~1 : sit ~ s The original Act of Incorporation of the National Academy of Sciences (From the archives of the Academy)
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23 Ibid., March 3, ~863, pp ~5°°-~5°~, ~5~7, ~546 The Thirty-seventh Congress (July 4, 86-March 3, ~863) that established the Academy also passed the Emancipation Act of April ~ 6, ~ 862, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia and another Act on June so abolishing slavery in the territories; established the Department of Agriculture on May ~ 5, ~ 86~; passed the Homestead Act of May so, ~86e, opening the public domain in the West to all who would settle there; a National Banking Act authorizing a truly national currency; the Pacific Railroad Act of July I, ~862, authorizing construction of a railroad to unite the Atlantic and Pacific seas; and the Morrill Land Grant Act of July a, ~ 86z, providing for the establishment of agricultural colleges in the states and territories, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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From page 57... ...
Bache, March 6, ~863 (Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)
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How shall the first meeting be called. I wish it were not done by you that no one can say this is going to be a branch of the Coast Survey and the liked Reaction to the New Academy Joseph Henry was apparently the first outside the little group of organizers to learn that a bill for an academy was before Congress, hearing of it on a chance visit to the Coast Survey office late in February.
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that the whole matter was in the hands of Senator Wilson! Agassiz arrived in Washington the day that I left (Febty both)
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333. 3' Davis, Life of Charles Henry Davis, p.
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Rogers (ed.) , Life and Letters of William Barton Rogers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., ~896)
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Herber (ed.) , Correspondence between Spencer Fullerton Baird and Louis Agassiz Two Pioneer American Naturalists (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ~963)
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on Wednesday, April id, a date Henry Wilson had determined from their replies, thirty-two of the fifty incorporators answered as their names were called in the chapel at New York University.40 The organizers of the Academy, Bache, Agassiz, Gould, Peirce, and Davis, as well as their still perplexed friend Joseph Henry, were present. So too were other intimates in the society of Lazzaroni, Wolcott Gibbs, fohn F
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From page 64... ...
left him little time to attend Academy meetings; Joseph Leidy, preeminent among American naturalists and Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, whose stream of papers on anatomy, vertebrate paleontology, geology, mineralogy, and botany, then numbering over zoo, eventually totaled 553; [. Peter Lesley, highly esteemed for his work in the Pennsylvania Geological Survey; Hubert A
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From page 65... ...
Hubbard of the Naval Observatory; John Strong Newberry, a physician then working with Wolcott Gibbs in the U.S. Sanitary Commission, who, self-trained in geology and paleontology and a genuine scientist, taught these subjects at Columbia after the war.
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66 I TheIncorporation and Organization of the academy Army Medical Corps, whose first volumes on the Coleoptera of North America marked him as possibly the greatest of American entomologists; Miers F Longstreth, a Pennsylvania merchant, physician, and amateur astronomer with a private observatory, who had had many articles published by the American Philosophical Society; John Rodgers, famed as the squadron commander of the North Pacific Exploration and Surveying Expedition of ~852-~856, and in ~863 was commanding a warship in the blockade of southern ports; Benjamin Silliman, Sr., then eighty-three, the "philosophical merchant" of American science since the founding of his./ournal in ~8~8 and Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Yale; and Jeffries Wyman, the eminent physiologist and zoologist at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School.
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From page 67... ...
~o3- ~o4. 48 Boyden's letter to Wolcott Gibbs in December ~863 declining membership is in the Academy register, "National Academy of Sciences, New York and Washington Meetings, ~ 863-'64," p.
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At a meeting of the American Philosophical Society on April ~7, its Proceedings noted: The Secretary [he may have been either John LeConte or, acting for him, Peter Lesley] made some remarks upon the organization of a National Academy of Science [sic]
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From page 69... ...
The New York newspapers, which relied on a garbled notice in the New York Commercial Advertiser of April 23 for information, were resentful that"the proceedings were conducted with closed doors," and resorted to hearsay and fustian. They attributed the founding of the "National Academy of Science" to a "Mutual Admiration Society" in Boston of lecturers and talkers eminent in science, art, and literature, or to "some persons in the Coast Survey." In a longer report on April 28, the New York Express charged "this Royal Society of America" and its "life aristocracy of fifty men" with plans to get possession of the Smithsonian and its funds and to "seize the scientific patronage of the country." It predicted that Congress on second thought would repeal the Act of Incorporation of this "very suspicious body" or modify it.57 A month later the New York Times published an extended account of the organization under the caption, "The New American Academy of Sciences" (which Wolcott Gibbs had prepared at Bache's request)
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~ ~ ~ Retry ~~ ~ ~ ~~" ~~ ~: dame person ~ ~ ~~. bent - .,.~:~-~co~pa~ ~ sums.
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Although few on the list should be left out, all the foremost scientific men of the country were not there, it observed. Nevertheless, "we hope the best for this important new ~ns~u~'on and trust that its leading men will later "purify the membership and raise its standard."58 The organization meeting on April c~ had begun inauspiciously for William Barton Rogers the night before.
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. William Barton Rogers, in a letter written a week later to his brother Henry, records a painful incident that occurred as he and Robert were ascending the stairs to attend the meeting.
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I had much use for my backbone, but did all calmly and without personality. I was supported in the general meeting by Newberry, and by Stephen Alexander on several occasions, and succeeded in modifying or defeating some of the most objectionable provisions, and, what is better, in having the whole open to immediate amendment or excision at the first stated meeting to be held in Washington next January.
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Caswell, the Secretary, Gould and other politic ones urged all the while that when the time of penitence and reconciliation should come, the oath should be set asides. Some one, I willingly forget who, argued that we would lose government patronage, unless we bid for it with the oath; I suspect it was only an unfortunate way of stating a higher truth, that we are the children of the government, and the Academy is the creation of the government, and owes it an oath of allegiance as its first duty....63 During this "somewhat protracted debate," as the Minutes reported, efforts by Joseph Leidy to amend the oath of fealty were rejected and the Article as written was adopted as the meeting adjourned.
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From page 75... ...
[and] therefore each member must be left to construe them for himself...." The Constitution did state that four consecutive unexcused absences from meetings constituted grounds for forfeiture of membership, a rule arising from the desire that committee reports be considered by the entire Academy before transmittal to the government.
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From page 76... ...
Next, James D Dana, although absent, was elected Vice-President, Louis Agassiz was named Foreign Secretary, Wolcott 66 Although natural history, not the physical sciences, was the most widely pursued scientific activity of the nineteenth century, more than twice as many of the incorporators of the Academy were in the physical sciences and technology as in the natural sciences.
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From page 77... ...
7S The Council met briefly that evening to discuss Article V, providing for the publication of "proceedings, memoirs, and reports." The Treasurer and Home Secretary recommended using the Transactions of the Royal Society as model for transactions or papers of the Academy and the Wiener Berichte as model for proceedings or abstracts of scientific memoirs ("Minutes of the Council, ~863-~902," p.
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From page 78... ...
420. At a dinner he attended at the Royal Society Club in London that fall, Lesley was asked about the Academy, and he gave an account of its founding, "upon which great laughter arose" prompting his Academy memoirist to add, "perhaps because it seemed to them so absurd that a scientific academy should be founded in a raw wilderness" (Ames, Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, vol.
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