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Franklin and the Nurturing of Science in Early America:
A popular debate in the eighteenth century was whether America would equal or surpass Europe in the arts and sciences. In his "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," the noted British philosopher Bishop George Berkeley viewed the course of civilization moving from east to west, from the Near East to Greece, to Rome, to Western Europe, and eventually across the Atlantic to the New World. In a 1771 commencement poem, "The Rising Glory of America," American writer and jurist Hugh Henry Brackenridge predicted a coming golden age for his country. At the same time, European intellectuals and scientists like the French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who viewed history as moving backwards in the New World, argued in his Natural History of Man that some aspect of that environment was causing a reversion to barbarism and degeneration. Thomas Jefferson, while ambassador to France, responded directly to Buffon's accusations in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Americans proudly pointed to Benjamin Franklin's discoveries in electricity; David Rittenhouse's achievements in optics and astronomy; Charles Willson Peale's museum of natural history and his exhumation of the mastodon, "the largest of territorial beings"; John John Jeffries's balloon flight and meteorological observations. These men were pioneers of what many contemporaries viewed as the "Rising Glory" of American science. |