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The Ends in View of the Preservation of the Private Papers of American ScientistsAuthor(s): Donald FlemingSource: Isis, Vol. 53, No. 1, The Conference on Science Manuscripts (Mar., 1962), pp. 118-121Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/227839 .

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The Ends in View of the

Preservation of the Private Papers

of American Scientists

By Donald Fleming

N DISCUSSING desirable kinds of documentary publications in the his-

tory of science in America, I shall begin by assuming that there is general agreement upon the desirability of publishing selected correspondence of

major or at least strategically placed figures. I may mention almost at random some of the persons for whom this would be desirable: Jeffries Wyman and Franklin P. Mall in anatomy; Ross G. Harrison, Frank R. Lillie, and E. G. Conklin in embryology; Thomas Hunt Morgan in genetics; Walter B. Cannon in physiology; E. B. Wilson (of Columbia) in cytology; William Morton Wheeler in natural history; Joseph Leidy in palaeontology; Franz Boas in anthropology; Charles H. Cooley in sociology; Elton Mayo in industrial psychology; Willis R. Whitney and C. E. K. Mees in the adminis- tration of industrial research; Edward L. Youmans in the popularization of science; Abraham Flexner in medical education; James Dwight Dana in

geology; William Cranch Bond, E. C. Pickering, and George Ellery Hale in

astronomy; Benjamin Silliman, Jr., Theodore W. Richards, Gilbert N. Lewis, and Arthur A. Noyes in chemistry; A. A. Michelson and Robert A. Millikan in physics.

I have not even mentioned men like Asa Gray, for whom collections of some sort exist, but for whom ampler, and in general much more technical, selections of correspondence ought to be edited in keeping with the best modern standards; for it must be borne in mind that many scientists for whom an old-fashioned 'life and letters' exist are very scantily represented in these books in their character as close investigators of technical matters.

Rather than attempt to swell the list of such names, I shall turn instead to some major issues in the history of science in America which the publication of these and other documents might be expected to elucidate. I may pose these issues in terms of 'lines of filiation: ' the filiation of men; the filiation of ideas; and the filiation of cultures.

By filiation of men I have in mind the relationship between master and student, between the director of an industrial laboratory or a government bureau or agency and the workers in it, and, more tenuously but no less

important, between colleagues within a laboratory, department, or univer-

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PRESERVATION OF PRIVATE PAPERS

sity. In a sense we are here dealing with institutional history, but from a side which has seldom been resorted to. To take the matter on the most elementary level, it is almost impossible to discover from the published histories of universities which subsequently distinguished investigators were trained where and under which professors, though it might well be thought that this was the very epitome of the intellectual history of universities. Let no one suppose that this deficiency can readily be made up by going to the biographies or biographical memoirs of the professors (as in the series issued by the National Academy of Sciences), for though they will tell where and under whom the man in question studied, they seldom treat of the men who studied under him. It is not of course mere lists that one is after, though that would be a beginning. What one wants to know is the

impact - positive, negative, or occasionally nil - of the professor upon his student, the intellectual and human relationship between them; and, as a check upon this, comparative materials drawn from the history of his trans- actions with other students. Long ago Sir William Osler gave us some insight into the central role of the clinician Pierre Louis of Paris in the

history of medical science in America; but nobody has ever attempted to draw together characteristic documents illustrative of Louis' influence, as upon the elder Holmes and the younger Jackson, the 'Rhode Island

Philosopher' Elisha Bartlett and the 'Alabama Student,' John Bassett. I

speak here of a European master, but precisely the same theme cries out to be delineated in documents portraying the relationship of American masters to American students - for example, of Thomas Hunt Morgan to the school of geneticists that he raised up. I would emphasize that the

pursuit and publication of this kind of document ought not to be confined to masters of students in the formal sense but might well be extended to include the influence of men like Whitney of General Electric or Mees of Eastman-Kodak upon the persons in their organizations. The role played by C. 0. Whitman and Frank Lillie at Woods Hole in influencing men who were never nominally their students would also be worth investigating.

Documents displaying the filiation of ideas would in part cut across these lines of personal filiation and in part run parallel. Thus the curious inter-

play of the work of T. H. Morgan, E. B. Wilson, Frank Lillie, and Ross Harrison in embryology, cytology, regeneration, and genetics ought to be illustrated, not only by collecting their principal memoirs from published sources, but also by tracing from their private papers the network of human relations which went to form the matrix of what would then be perceived as a common endeavor from which they sometimes swung out in wide excursions but to which they always returned. The true universe of dis- course within which their seemingly rather disparate researches proceeded can only be recovered by this juxtaposition of published and unpublished, public and private, materials. Another kind of filiation for which documents

ought to be sought - and, my present point, juxtaposed - is the one between

technological advances and the theoretical researches which they made pos- sible. Thus one would like to see a thorough interpenetration of the manu-

script remains of Thomas A. Edison, J. A. Fleming, W. D. Coolidge, Irving

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DONALD FLEMING

Langmuir, and Owen Richardson, to display the way in which the perfecting of the light bulb and hence the electronic valve could lead on in Langmuir's case to the founding of a science of surface chemistry and in Richardson's to the founding of a science of thermionics. More generally, one would like to see the juxtaposition of documents setting forth the expectations of inventors from their devices and the profound theoretical insights to which

they have often led in the hands of others. Now, the desirability of publishing documents which display the filiation

of ideas, both between inventors and theorists and among scientists them- selves, is evident enough. I merely wish to point out that there have been few if any efforts to bring together in sourcebooks the two relevant kinds of material for this purpose - not only the published memoirs, of which the

general historical situation is fairly well understood, but also private papers bearing upon the genesis of these memoirs. Indeed, almost all anthologies in the history of science have been restricted to classic communications, which

certainly deserve the place of honor but often merely obscure the actual historical process by which the findings have been elicited. Our present sourcebooks are, so to say, macro-historical, passing by large quantum-jumps from one major insight to another, but lacking in the micro-historical element by which the emergence of a particular contribution has been con- ditioned. This of course is the point of Charles Singer's wise remark that the characteristic form of scientific memoirs is anti-historical, serving to

impose a retrospective order and semblance of inexorable logic upon materials which emerged in an entirely different sequence. If, therefore, more of the private papers of scientists are preserved and then intercalated with their published findings, we shall be moving toward a new kind of source- book for the history of science, in which the true historical element will be much stronger, deeper, and more continuous than before. It is self-evident that the chief obstacle to this in the past has been the one which this conference is seeking to clear away- the notoriously inefficient and erratic

preservation of scientists' private papers. If, finally, we turn to what I call the filiation of cultures, I here have in

mind the desirability of documenting the transit of ideas from Europe to America and more recently perhaps the other way around; but also, in the Snovian sense of 'two cultures,' the transmission of ideas from scientists to laymen. It is a source of some surprise, even astonishment, to realize that there is still no general history of the reception of Newtonianism in America, though Frederick Brasch long appeared to be on the verge of producing this, and I. Bernard Cohen has of course dealt with the subject in the special context of Franklin's work. But equally we have no extended account in

print of the reception of Darwinism in America, despite a number of doc- toral dissertations on the subject, of which Bert Loewenberg's is best known; no history of the early reception of Weismannism, Mendelism, and the mutation theory; and none of the response to Einstein. Perhaps the most notable exceptions to this lack of satisfactory published accounts are the work of Mrs. Richmond on the germ theory in America and the long series of contributions by Duveen and Klickstein on the acclimatization of the new chemistry.

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PRESERVATION OF PRIVATE PAPERS

Up to this point, I have had chiefly in view the response of scientifically knowledgeable people, who could study the new doctrines at first hand in the sources or translations of these. As a complement to this for edu- cated layman, one would like to have studies in the history of scientific popularization. We are all more or less aware of Euler, Voltaire, and the purveyors of Newtonianism-for-ladies in the eighteenth century; of the champion of evolution Edward L. Youmans; and of those portentous figures, the editors of Life, who seem for this purpose to come down to Lincoln Barnett. Yet to my knowledge no serious histories have yet been written of the process by which at least the large outlines of new scientific work have been passed on to the community at large. The uncovering and publication of the papers of men, like Youmans, who have been conspicuous in this work of popularization, would be one of the significant contributions to scholarship that might flow from the work of this conference.

DR. HUEMANN: Thank you, Professor Guerlac, for reading Professor

Fleming's paper. I take it the Chairman can occasionally be autocratic and interpose comments. One comment that occurs to me is about the affiliation of people.

There was an interesting study made about twenty years ago by Virginia Bartow at the University of Illinois. She attempted to determine under whom the faculty of the Chemistry Department and the Chemical Engi- neering Department had studied. She was astounded to find that they went back to one person: Dr. Fourcroy, in Paris, about 1790. Every single person in the University of Illinois Chemistry Department had been trained, in a sense, by one person 150 years before. I think this is a fascinating subject for a lot more work.

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