p. 41
- Humboldt had just returned from his South American explorations, and while guest of honor at the American Philosophical Society he received an invitation from Peale to be introduced to the President of the United States (7). After this visit Humboldt returned to Europe and, in correspondence with Jefferson, expressed much interest in Western explorations in America.
- Jefferson's interest in science was particularly centered in his own country. He knew the leading naturalists in America and was associated with the members of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. When that city was the seat of the federal government, it was also the scientific center of the United States. As President of the Society, which he became in 1797 while he was also Vice President of the United States, Jefferson exercised an influence on science and could easily consult the leading scientists of the country. Americans could wonder at a man about to be inaugurated Vice President who would bring with him a collection of fossil bones from Virginia; and later it was a strange President who, in the midst of the excitement over the embargo, would carry on geological studies and keep fossil bones from the Big Bone Lick of Kentucky in the unfinished rooms of the presidential mansion.
- That he was aware of the importance to science for this new and unexplored land and the need to seek out its resources is seen in a letter he wrote to the President of Harvard:
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- What a field have we at our doors to signalize ourselves in! The Botany of America is far from being
- exhausted, its Mineralogy is untouched, and its Natural History or Zoology, totally mistaken and
- misrepresented. As far as I have seen there is not one single species of terrestrial birds common to Europe and America, and I question if there be a single species of quadrupeds. (Domestic animals are to be excepted.) It is for such institutions as that over which you preside so worthily, Sir, to do justice to our country, its productions and its genius. It is the work to which the young men, whom you are forming, should lay their hands. (8)
- What a field have we at our doors to signalize ourselves in! The Botany of America is far from being
- _________________
- 7. "Extracts from Charles W. Peale's Diary," a manuscript copy by Peale's daughter, (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division). Peale wrote a charming account of the trip from Philadelphia to Washington made by himself and two other Philadelphians with Humboldt and his two companions.
- 8. Jefferson to Joseph Willard, in Browne, "Jefferson and the Scientific Trends of his Time," Cronica Botanica, VIII, 383.
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- 7. "Extracts from Charles W. Peale's Diary," a manuscript copy by Peale's daughter, (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division). Peale wrote a charming account of the trip from Philadelphia to Washington made by himself and two other Philadelphians with Humboldt and his two companions.