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87 Crossing Borders The Smithsonian Institution and Nineteenth-Century Diffusion of Scientific Information between the United States and Canada ber฀ trum฀h.฀mac฀ don฀ ald In late spring 1876, a letter written by Roderick MacFarlane, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company stationed in Fort Chipewyan, Athabasca District (now northern Alberta), reached Spencer Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. “I have been sadly disappointed for the last year,” MacFarlane wrote, “not a single Harper publication has come to hand for 1875, and none so far for 1876. I’d sooner have gone without many other things. I wrote you on this subject last winter. I regret to be giving you so much trouble year after year; but you are so very kind & obliging that I am tempted to trespass on your good nature. Let me know, please, the cost of the volumes & papers & how we stand. My $50.00 may be assumed with what I lately directed to be sent for the [buying?] purposes, while any balance owing I will only be too glad to remit later on.”1 Living far from metropolitan centers, MacFarlane keenly felt his isolation from the latest developments in science when publications did not arrive regularly. That he relied on the Smithsonian Institution as his supplier of scientific publications was not unusual. As the body of scientific literature grew substantially in the nineteenth century, the Smithsonian Institution, established in Washington, D.C., in 1846 from the bequest of the Englishman James Smithson, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men,” had by 1876 become the world’s leading agency for the international distribution of scientific publications.2 The history 88 ฀ bertrum฀h.฀macdonald of the formal international publication exchange program, led and managed by the Smithsonian, has been ably detailed by Nancy Gwinn; but less formal mechanisms for distributing scientific publications are not well understood.3 Due to the prominence of the first secretaries, Joseph Henry and Spencer Baird, the large correspondence networks that became the mainstay of scientific work in the nineteenth century very quickly involved the Smithsonian Institution . Baird, for example, noted in 1860 that he personally wrote about three thousand letters per year, complemented by a large body of additional official correspondence written by staff members on his behalf.4 This number steadily increased so that by 1875 the office generated upwards of fifty-five hundred letters. Over the course of his more than thirty-five-year employment at the Smithsonian, tens of thousands of letters flowed in and out of his office in the castle headquarters in Washington, D.C., to a vast network of individuals “who looked to him for encouragement, advice, instruction, equipment, supplies, money, and a link to the outside world.”5 This large body of correspondence provides detailed evidence of scientific activities throughout the North American continent and beyond. Among that correspondence are letters exchanged with Canadians whose scientific endeavors were encouraged by a northward flow of scientific publications to locations as isolated as MacFarlane’s Fort Chipewyan in the north and to cities and towns like Toronto; Montreal; Quebec City; and Windsor, Nova Scotia closer to the American border. Information and publications moved both north and south; the flow was decidedly not unidirectional. The relationships among correspondents “were far from being simply exploitative or onesided ,” a point Jim Endersby has made about nineteenth-century naturalists in his recent book Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Endersby emphasized that correspondence like this reveals “a complex interdependence and mutual benefits, within which individuals bartered whatever they could in an effort to satisfy conflicting desires and competing agendas.”6 In the present essay, archival records at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere are probed to demonstrate how the dissemination of knowledge via letters and publications across the Canadian–American border fostered scientific work in both countries. The pursuit of science in the last half of the nineteenth century had, in the words of Robert Bruce, “become a collective enterprise” where the spread of scientific investigation hinged on the “systematizing of communication” among the growing number of practicing scientists.7 Several elements figured prominently in this organized communication. Natural history and related scientific societies were formed throughout Canada and the United States by the score. These associations served largely to foster information exchange promoted through lectures given at meetings, journals exchanged widely with other like organizations, and information and publications that accumulated in their [3.131.13.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 14:54...

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