Science in America [antikvár]

Preface This book is intended to recapture the past of American science by bringing together a number of writings from and about scientific endeavor in American society from the seventeenth century to the early 1970s. In tracing the ideas of Americans of other times concerning their attempts to understand matter and life, such a volume unwittingly raises questions about science in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century as well as offering perspectives upon it. The intention is, nevertheless, not to illuminate our present dilemmas but to use words from former times to suggest in a concrete way how the study and understanding of nature has changed in three and a half centuries. The constant in this volume is science: empirical and theoretical efforts to discover the contents and behavior of the world and the universe, arriving at answers that were couched in naturalistic terms and that could be verified by other, open-minded members of the scientific community. Ordinarily this endeavor, science, included both the physical and the biological sciences. Although it is possible in these selections to trace the major currents and developments in the various sciences, the substantive content is not technical, and an intelligent reader ought to be able to follow and understand all of the documents. Often in the past, Americans were concerned not so much with new knowledge and ways of looking at nature as with how such knowledge could be utilized for the benefit of man. Applied science (even in the form of technology) and pure science are very difficult to separate in practice, and particularly within the American experience. This is reflected in the selections. The present history, however, is focused on science as newly discovered or newly systematized knowledge. Applied science is brought in only as it nourished or inhibited the enterprise and institutions of science. Thus, the histories of American industrial research, of American technology, and of American medicine are excluded insofar as possible. Each has a literature of its own. Each contributes as background, but the focus here is on the mainstream history of American science. The topic is approached from the social and historical points of view. For the social point of view, the selections contain material showing how science affected American civilization and institutions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how the American environment affected the development of science as a body of knowledge and as a social institudon. In order to