Thomas Say: New World Naturalist (review)

Book Reviews41 Thomas Say: New World Naturalist. By Patricia Tyson Stroud. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. xv + 340 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Thomas Say (1787-1 834) was the first American naturalist to find, name, and publish descriptions of a large number ofAmerican insects and shells. He was one ofAmerica's first professionals in that he devoted almost his entire adulthood to his favorite branches ofnatural history, earning for his last decade a "life grant" from his patron and surrogate parent, William Maclure (1763-1840). The wealthy Scot retired early to travel and explore the geology of Europe and North America, and met Say, curator ofthe new Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, months after his father died in 1813. Say's life as an ex-Quaker shows the effects ofthe Quaker tradition. His father, an apothecary and physician, belonged to the Society of Free Quakers who supported the American Revolution. His mother, who died when he was six, was William Bartram the Quaker botanist's niece. Thomas Say was sent to the new Quaker school atWesttown in 1799 anddeveloped alifelong friendshipwithFriend Reuben Haines, his Westtown classmate, an amateur naturalist. He hated his three years of compulsory worship and negative discipline at the boarding school, although he later used the science, literature, and Bible he learned there. I see residual Quakerismnotonly in Say's appreciation ofnature as the home ofGod, but also in his concerned dealings with the Indians met on his travels, recording their ways, and sometimes treating their diseases with what he had learned at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. Stroud threads her way through a rain forest ofcorrespondence. Say was a letter writer by nature and office, as curator of the Philadelphia Academy, and as a passionate naturalist aiming to demonstrate to the scientific world the preeminence ofAmerican naturalists. His great-grandfather, John Bartram, had been a founder ofthe American Philosophical Society, which appointed Say curator in 1821 . His participation as zoologist on Maj. Stephen H. Long's expedition to the Rockies, 1819-20, and to the lakes north of the Minnesota-Canadian border in 1823, increased his data network. His last eight years in the provincial village of New Harmony, Indiana, requiredconstantcorrespondencewith thecenters ofsciencefor books, printing materials, specimens, and exchange of information. A good deal of Stroud's narrative flows on a stream of quotations from these letters. They are interesting remarks, but perhaps her story would glide even more smoothly if the author told it straight, with her judicious comment and perceptive interpretations incorporated. She is familiar with the most recent literature about science in the age of Jackson, Western explorations, and the setting of Say's freethinking philosophy. Sheconsiders all sides ofSay's personality withoutlosing focus on his science. After Maclure moved to Mexico in 1828, his patronage pinned Say to New Harmony as editor of Maclure's writings and as a caretaker of Maclure's Indiana property. Maclure was interested in popular education for social reform more than in scientific research, although he subsidized Say's work. In 1 838 he gave Thomas H. Palmer ofPittsford, Vermont, although unknown to him, $400 for a local public library, but Say's widow could not persuade him to finance the more expensive republication ofthe entomologist's collected essays. The authorhas exhaustively consulted the known sources and relied on the latest 42Quaker History works about related subjects. Her forty-seven contemporary illustrations are judiciously placed in the text. The index is unusually helpful. Burlington, Vt.Thomas D. S. Bassett Cork City Quakers 1655-1939: A BriefHistory. By Richard S. Harrison. Bantry: Privately Published by the Author, 1991. [3], iii, 91pp, illus. Available from the Author for $ 1 8 (including first class airmail postage): 2 Marine Street, Bantry, Co. Cork, Republic of Ireland. This is a rich and fascinating monograph in which Richard S. Harrison vividly combines the Friend's call to publish the truth with the antiquary's urge to record some ofthe unwritten history ofhis county and its capital. Irish Quakerism has not received the kind of professional attention from modem historians that it has deserved—the continuing researches of Kenneth Carroll, Charles Cherry, and Harrison himselfprove...