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Introduction A Bridge to America: Count Paolo Andreani and His Journal Count Paolo Andreani began the journal of his 1790 trip at the northern tip of Manhattan Island. He proceeded to traverse a wooden bridge to reach the present-day Bronx, or, as he put it, “to enter the continent.” Travelers of Andreani’s day were acutely aware that the city of New York (then conWned to the southern end of Manhattan) lay off the coast of North America, separate from the mainland.1 Andreani’s understanding of geography suggests important differences between his universe—both physical and mental—and our own. He presents us with a long-lost rural world, and he shows it to us from seemingly strange angles. Although he was surrounded by grand vistas , his gaze was often oriented toward rocks and minerals on the ground. His propensity to measure temperature, atmospheric electricity , and even people seems to border on the obsessive. A dog died, he tells us, precisely forty-two minutes after being bitten by a rattlesnake with twenty-nine “knots” in its tail. Even the absence of numbers disturbed him: he railed against the therapeutic use of the springs at Saratoga “while there is not a thorough analysis of them of any sort.” Andreani was not alone in his enthusiasm for numbers. His observations reXect the esprit géometrique2 that suffused educated Europe, and the Italian states in particular, in the eighteenth century. Since numbers held out great promise for illuminating the workings of the 1. Of course, culturally speaking, many today continue to hold this view. See Francesco dal Verme, Seeing America and Its Great Men: The Journal and Letters of Count Francesco dal Verme, 1783–1784, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Cometti (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 8; William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. J. E. Strickland (New York: New-York Historical Society , 1971), 89; Jacques Gérard Milbert, Picturesque Itinerary of the Hudson River, ed. and trans. Constance D. Sherman (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968), v. 2. The term is a contemporary one and has been translated as “quantifying spirit.” Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2; Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–17. natural and social orders, enlightened men and women took to measuring everything from air pressure to population. The United States would catch this fever later in the 1790s, in part through the inXuence of persons like Andreani. Thomas Jefferson, who shared rock samples with the count, wrote to a colleague that “[t]here is a Count Andriani of Milan here who sais there is a work on the subject of weights and measures published by Frisi of Milan.”3 ScientiWc inquiry became the basis of Andreani’s relationships with the Founding Fathers, who, like many learned Americans, considered themselves students of the laws of nature. The range of possible topics for discussion may be gleaned from the titles of a series of unpublished scientiWc studies produced by Andreani in the form of letters. These included “The impact of the sun on various substances,” “Brief instructions for capture of butterXies,” and “Method for the manufacture of sealing-wax.”4 The suitability of the travel journal for the purposes of scientiWc observation enhanced the appeal of travel journals to Andreani and his fellow citizens of the Republic of Letters. In his 1790 journal, Andreani surveyed minerals and rocks he encountered, much as fellow Milanese Luigi Castiglioni had done with American Xora.5 In so doing, Andreani was participating in a controversy over the origin of rocks. Did they owe their composition to volcanic heat, as Nicolas Desmarest and other “Vulcanists” asserted? To a process of slow cooling and consolidation under the crust, as “Plutonists” like James Hutton claimed? Or were they created from water, as “Neptunist” Abraham Werner charged, citing the Great Flood? Andreani fell into the last camp, as suggested by his Wernerian identiWcation of gneiss as a “primitive” rock. His Neptunist sensibilities also were visible in his description of “big boulders . . . most of which were probably transported from far away by the waters of the river, or by some great upheaval” at Manhattan , as well as his reference to “banks” when describing the glacial landscape of the Albany Pine Bush.6 2 Introduction 3. Patricia Cline Cohen, A...

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