Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (review)

Leonard Warren. Joseph Leidy: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 352 pp. $35.00.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were among the first to argue that American intellectuals should look to America and other Americans as a topic worthy of discussion. Historians of science, it seems, have yet to learn this lesson. Leonard Warren laments that Joseph Leidy, like many early American naturalists, has gone unnoticed and unappreciated. While working as a scientist in Leidy's hometown of Philadelphia, Warren saw many references to Leidy on buildings and such, but knew nothing about him. Intrigued by this name without a face, he set out to redress the loss to history.

Joseph Leidy (1823-1891) was one of the founders of paleontology in America. A brilliant polymath whose hyperactive mind approached biology in a scattershot fashion, he would become interested in a field; do intense, rigorous, and often pioneering research; and then bounce to the next topic that caught his attention, leaving the previous field to be exploited by someone else. He did groundbreaking work in paleontology, parasitology, microscopy, anatomy, public health, and other areas, many of which had never been explored by Americans before. He described the first dinosaur discovered in America, the hadrosaur of Haddonfield, New Jersey, and was the first to put forward the notion that the fossils of the United States represented, not lone monsters and oddities, but entire faunas that had covered the continent in the same way that modern animals do.

Nominally a neo-Lamarckian who believed in directed evolution and an unknowable creator, Leidy supported Darwin, but never taught evolution in his classes. Modest to the point of obsequiousness, he kept his personal views to himself, and worked meticulously to build up mountains of facts. He was a working-class boy yearning to be a middle-class gentleman who had achieved a place in Philadelphia's social elite due to his scientific success; loath to threaten his position, therefore, he rarely spoke out or rocked the boat. He shied away from theorizing, but was instead a great descriptive scientist carefully cataloging the morphological minutiae that became foundational material for later studies. He did little to promote himself or his causes for fear of seeming ungentlemanly or vulgar; as a result, issues he found important, as well as his own career, suffered. Unlike Philadelphia's other scientific wunderkind, Edward Drinker Cope, Leidy closed in, kept personal matters personal, and wrote brilliant but dry papers that rarely made intellectual leaps or went beyond the obvious. He disliked his former student Cope intensely, not because he thought him devoid of intellectual ability, but because he disliked his brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. Leidy even went so far as to side with Cope's hated rival, Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale, in the famous bone wars of the 1870s.

Warren's comprehensive biography discusses not only Leidy's life, but the intellectual world of Philadelphia in which he worked. He gives a good overview of this fascinating nineteenth-century scientific establishment and the various triumphs and in-fighting that were its hallmark, particularly the struggle over whether to modernize such institutions as the Academy of Natural Sciences or to keep them the domain of wealthy dilettantes who saw natural history as a hobby, not a profession. This part of the book is a fine complement to the work currently being done on American scientific institutional history by Jane Maienschein, Keith Benson, Ronald Rainger, and others. As a biologist with the Wistar Institute, Warren discusses the science of Leidy's work clearly and in a way that non-science specialists can understand and therefore appreciate. Through it all, however, the voice of Joseph Leidy, as it was in life, is somewhat muted.

Leidy never really speaks; he remains an enigmatic shadow who even in death refuses to give himself up completely. Warren's fast-paced narrative covers the myriad areas that Leidy examined, but the...