The History Book Club discussion
This topic is about
The Metaphysical Club
PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS
>
7. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB ~ August 5th - August 11th ~~ Part Three - Chapter Seven ~ (151- 176) ~ The Peirces ~No-Spoilers, please
message 2:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 01:39AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Message One - on each non spoiler thread - will help you find all of the information that you need for each week's reading.
For Week Seven - for example, we are reading and discussing the following:
Week Seven - August 5th - August 11th
Part Three - Chapter Seven
The Peirces (151 - 176)
Please only discuss Chapter Seven through page 176 on this thread. However from now on you can also discuss any of the pages that came before this week's reading - including anything in the Preface or Introduction or anything in Chapter One through Chapter Six. However the main focus of this week's discussion is Chapter Seven.
This is a non spoiler thread.
But we will have in this folder a whole bunch of spoiler threads dedicated to all of the pragmatists or other philosophers or philosophic movements which I will set up as we read along and on any of the additional spoiler threads - expansive discussions about each of the pragmatists/philosophers/philosophic movements can also take place on any of these respective threads. Spoiler threads are also clearly marked.
If you have any links, or ancillary information about anything dealing with the book itself feel free to add this to our Glossary thread.
If you have lists of books or any related books about the people discussed, or about the events or places discussed or any other ancillary information - please feel free to add all of this to the thread called - Bibliography.
If you would like to plan ahead and wonder what the syllabus is for the reading, please refer to the Table of Contents.
If you would like to write your review of the book and present your final thoughts because maybe you like to read ahead - the spoiler thread where you can do all of that is called Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts. You can also have expansive discussions there.
For all of the above - the links are always provided in message one.
Always go to message one of any thread to find out all of the important information you need.
Bentley will be moderating this book and Kathy will be the backup.
message 3:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:05AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Here are the rules and guidelines of the HBC:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/5...
Please on the non spoiler threads: a) Stick to material in the present week's reading.
Also, in terms of all of the threads for discussion here and on the HBC - please be civil.
We want our discussion to be interesting and fun.
Make sure to cite a book using the proper format.
You don't need to cite the Menand book, but if you bring another book into the conversation; please cite it accordingly as required.
Now we can begin week seven....
message 4:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 05:27PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Chapter Seven: The Peirces
Part 2, Chapter 7 - The Peirces, Section One
We are introduced to Charles Peirce, who helped influence pragmatic thinking.
Part 2, Chapter 7 - The Peirces, Section Two
In this section, the author introduces us to the world of Charles Peirce's father. This was a man who was quiet and brilliant. He expected more from his students, and even more from himself.
Math came to him easily, and yet he realized that it was not as easy for his students.
He tried to help them understand. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not.
However, he spent the majority of his adult life trying to prove that logic and statistics
could be used to predict outcomes. Charles Pierce's father believes the universe can
be known through statistics. This is the man whom Charles Peirce must succeed.
Part 2, Chapter 7 - The Peirces, Section Three
He seems to have lived in his father's shadow his entire young adult life. He works with his father and it becomes apparent that many expect him to exceed his father and create something new.
However, it is obvious that Charles cannot stay in his father's shadow and that his drug
addiction may cause problems.
His marriage to Harriet Melusina Fay does not seem very compatible either. From the little the author knows about Charles, there are many obstacles he must clear before he can be his own person.
Part 2, Chapter 7 - The Peirces, Section Four
In this section, the author introduces us to The Robinson v. Mandell case. This was also called the Howland Case and dealt with the disposition of wealth made in whaling.
We learn how Benjamin and Charles worked very well together on this case and became famous.
The author tells us how they were on the edge of a new way of thinking, and we learn that this will eventually lead to a portion of the pragmatic thinking that will begin to influence philosophical thinking shortly after the Civil War.
Part 3, Chapter 7 - The Peirces, Section 5
The culmination of this case is a climax in Charles Peirce's life. He has helped his father prove that the use of statistics could answer many questions that seemed to have no answer.
They used numbers to prove the validity of a signature. This upset the scientific world as much as it did the general public.
Benjamin let Charles ride his coattails. And it shows the timeline of how far Charles has come and where he might branch off next.
message 5:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:44AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
The Metaphysical Club
by John Shook
The Metaphysical Club was an informal discussion group of scholarly friends, close from their associations with Harvard University, that started in 1871 and continued until spring 1879.
This Club had two primary phases, distinguished from each other by the most active participants and the topics pursued.
The first phase of the Metaphysical Club lasted from 1871 until mid-1875, while the second phase existed from early 1876 until spring 1879. The dominant theme of first phase was pragmatism, while idealism dominated the second phase.
Pragmatism - First Phase:
The "pragmatist" first phase of the Metaphysical Club was organized by Charles Peirce (Harvard graduate and occasional lecturer), Chauncey Wright (Harvard graduate and occasional lecturer), and William James (Harvard graduate and instructor of physiology and psychology).
These three philosophers were then formulating recognizably pragmatist views. Other active members of the "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club were two more Harvard graduates and local lawyers, Nicholas St. John Green and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who were also advocating pragmatic views of human conduct and law.
Idealist - Second Phase:
The "idealist" second phase of the Metaphysical Club was organized and led by idealists who showed no interest in pragmatism: Thomas Davidson (independent scholar), George Holmes Howison (professor of philosophy at nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and James Elliot Cabot (Harvard graduate and Emerson scholar). There was some continuity between the two phases.
Although Peirce had departed in April 1875 for a year in Europe, and Wright died in September 1875, most of the original members from the first phase were available for a renewed second phase.
By January 1876 the "Idealist" Metaphysical Club (for James still was referring to a metaphysical club in a letter of 10 February 1876) was meeting regularly for discussions first on Hume, then proceeding through Kant and Hegel in succeeding years.
Besides Davidson, Howison, and Cabot, the most active members appear to be William James, Charles Carroll Everett (Harvard graduate and Dean of its Divinity School), George Herbert Palmer (Harvard graduate and professor of philosophy), and Francis Ellingwood Abbott (Harvard graduate and independent scholar).
Other occasional participants include Francis Bowen (Harvard graduate and professor of philosophy), Nicholas St. John Green, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and G. Stanley Hall (Harvard graduate and psychologist).
The Metaphysical Club was a nine-year episode within a much broader pattern of informal philosophical discussion that occurred in the Boston area from the 1850s to the 1880s.
Chauncey Wright, renowned in town for his social demeanor and remarkable intelligence, had been a central participant in various philosophy clubs and study groups dating as early as his own college years at Harvard in the early 1850s.
Wright, Peirce, James, and Green were the most active members of the Metaphysical Club from its inception in 1871.
By mid-1875 the original Metaphysical Club was no longer functioning; James was the strongest connection between the first and second phases, helping Thomas Davidson to collect the members of the "Idealist" Metaphysical Club.
Link to the Hegel Club:
James also was a link to the next philosophical club, the "Hegel Club", which began in fall 1880 in connection with George Herbert Palmer's seminar on Hegel. By winter 1881 the Hegel Club had expanded to include several from the Metaphysical Club, including James, Cabot, Everett, Howison, Palmer, Abbott, Hall, and the newcomer William Torrey Harris who had taken up residence in Concord.
This Hegel Club was in many ways a continuation of the St. Louis Hegelian Society from the late 1850s and 1860s, as Harris, Howison, Davidson, and their Hegelian students had moved east.
The Concord Summer School of Philosophy (1879-1888), under the leadership of Amos Bronson Alcott and energized by the Hegelians, soon brought other young American scholars into the orbit of the Cambridge clubs, such as John Dewey.
The "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club met on irregular occasions, probably fortnightly during the Club's most active period of fall 1871 to winter 1872, and they usually met in the home of Charles Pierce or William James in Cambridge.
This Club met for four years until mid-1875, when their diverse career demands, extended travels to Europe, and early deaths began to disperse them. The heart of the club was the close bonds between five very unusual thinkers on the American intellectual scene.
Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce shared the same scientific interests and outlook, having adopted a positivistic and evolutionary stance, and their common love for philosophical discussion sparked the club's beginnings. Wright's old friend and lawyer Nicholas St. John Green was glad to be included, as was Peirce's good friend William James who had also gone down the road towards empiricism and evolutionism. William James brought along his best friend, the lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who like Green was mounting a resistance to the legal formalism dominating that era. Green brought fellow lawyer Joseph Bangs Warner, and the group also invited two philosophers who had graduated with them from Harvard, Francis Ellingwood Abbott and John Fiske, who were both interested in evolution and metaphysics.
Other occasional members were Henry Ware Putnam, Francis Greenwood Peabody, and William Pepperell Montague.
Activities of the "Pragmatist" Metaphysical Club were recorded only by Peirce, William James, and William's brother Henry James, who all describe intense and productive debates on many philosophical problems.
Both Peirce and James recalled that the name of the club was the "Metaphysical" Club. Peirce suggests that the name indicated their determination to discuss deep scientific and metaphysical issues despite that era's prevailing positivism and agnosticism. A successful "Metaphysical Club" in London was also not unknown to them. Peirce later stated that the club witnessed the birth of the philosophy of pragmatism in 1871, which he elaborated (without using the term 'pragmatism' itself) in published articles in the late 1870s. His own role as the "father of pragmatism" should not obscure, in Peirce's view, the importance of Nicholas Green. Green should be recognized as pragmatism's "grandfather" because, in Peirce's words, Green had "often urged the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief as 'that upon which a man is prepared to act,' from which 'pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary'." Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as a vital alternative to rationalistic speculation.
The several lawyers in this club took great interest in evolution, empiricism, and Bain's pragmatic definition of belief.
They were also acquainted with James Stephen's A General View of the Criminal Law in England, which also pragmatically declared that people believe because they must act. At the time of the Metaphysical Club, Green and Holmes were primarily concerned with special problems in determining criminal states of mind and general problems of defining the nature of law in a culturally evolutionary way.
Both Green and Holmes made important advances in the theory of negligence which relied on a pragmatic approach to belief and established a "reasonable person" standard. Holmes went on to explore pragmatic definitions of law that look forward to future judicial consequences rather than to past legislative decisions.
(Source: http://www.pragmatism.org/research/me...)
message 6:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:48AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
While reading the book - try to take some notes about the ideas presented along the following lines:
1. Science
2. Religion
3. Philosophy
4. Psychology
5. Sociology
6. Evolution
7. Pragmatism
There are very good reasons why this book is not only called The Metaphysical Club but also after the colon: A Story of Ideas in America and the purpose of our discussion of this book is "to discuss those ideas".
Don't just read my posts - but jump right in - the more you post and the more you contribute - the more you will get out of the conversation and the read.
message 7:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 10, 2013 07:14AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Please feel free to select any topic, person, idea, event, group or even a new vocabulary word to discuss in context with this chapter and discussion.
Remember we are discussing major ideas and events right off the bat:
Ideas:
Metaphysics
Pragmatism
The Metaphysical Club
Darwinism
Evolution
Transcendentalism (Transcendentalists)
Abolitionism (Abolitionists)
Events:
The American Civil War
People:
Louis Agassiz*
William James - did not serve in Civil War*
French Paleontologist, George Cuvier
Prussian Naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt
Josiah Nott
Abraham Lincoln
Charles William Eliot
Charles Darwin (Darwinians)*
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Lamarckians)
Herbert Spencer (Spencerians)
Joseph Hooker
Asa Gray
Samuel Morton
Thomas Huxley
Sigmund Freud
Elizabeth Cary Agassiz
Alonzo Potter (Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania)
Sarah Potter
Benjamin Peirce* - a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University and perhaps the first serious research mathematician in America - father of Charles Sanders Pierce
William Dean Howells
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (referred to in this chapter as Wendell Holmes) - did serve in Civil War*
Wilky James (Garth Wilkinson James) - brother of William James - served in Civil War*
Bob James (Robertson James) - brother of William James - also served in Civil War*
Henry James Sr. (father of William, Wilky, Bob, Henry Jr, Alice)*
Charles Sanders Pierce* - son of Benjamin Peirce - was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.
Sarah Hunt Mills Pierce - mother of Charles Sanders Pierce, wife of Benjamin Pierce and daughter of Elijah Hunt Mills*
Benjamin R. Curtis*
William Henry Channing*
James Freeman Clarke* - the Transcendentalist*
George Bancroft - historian*
Reverend John Peirce*
Ralph Waldo Emerson" - author of "American Scholar"
Franklin Sanborn - abolitionist*
Thomas Hill (1862 - 69) - President of Harvard*
Charles William Eliot (1869 - 1909) - President of Harvard*
A. Lawrence Lowell (1909-33) - President of Harvard - wrote thesis on quaternions*
William Rowan Hamilton - Irish mathematician - devised quaternions - a type of abstract number*
Groups
The National Academy of Sciences
Government:
The Constitution
Bill of Rights
Emancipation Proclamation
Places
Harvard*
Lawrence Scientific School
Things
None in this chapter
Vocabulary
Brahmins
Intellectual Elitist
Meritocrat
message 8:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 11:51AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Chapter abstracts are short descriptions of events that occur in each chapter.
They highlight major plot events and detail the important relationships and characteristics of characters and objects.
The Chapter Abstracts that I will add can be used to review what you have read, and to prepare you for what you will read.
These highlights can be a reading guide or you can use them in your discussion to discuss any of these points. I add them so these bullet points can serve as a "refresher" or a stimulus for further discussion.
Here are a few:
New Abstracts:
* Charles Sanders Pierce studied chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.
* Pierce's work was always an expansion of his father's work.
* Professor Pierce viewed math as the purest language of thought.
* Pierce and Agassiz lobbied Congress to form a National Academy of Science.
* Pierce had a bit of an opium addiction.
* The Civil War destroyed the whaling business.
* The estate won on account of a technicality.
* Hetty married Edward Green and moved to London.
message 9:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 12:22PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
New Questions:
These questions that are general questions that you should be able to discuss integrating information that you read from previous chapters and this one. Also keep some of these questions in mind as you read further.
a) How did Benjamin Pierce view mathematics and its place within the scientific community?
b) What business did the Civil War destroy, though it did not interfere with the textile industry in New England
c) What was based on a combination of the theory of probability and statistics?
d) Why did many people fear the idea of mathematical laws, such as the Law of Errors?
e) What did Darwin ascertain from the study of flora in Eastern Asia and North
America? Why was it controversial?
f) What were Buckle's four influences on the human species and why were they
important to 19th Century sociology and physiology?
g) What was Oliver Wendell Holmes' contribution to the theory of pragmatism?
h) What role did Darwin, Laplace, and Lamarck play in the pragmatic theory?
i) What is the difference between Swedenborgism and Mesmerism? How do you think
they influenced William James?
message 10:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 09:50PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
a) "There is a son of Professor Pierce, who I suspect to be a very 'smart' fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent & violent though," William James wrote to his family soon after he entered the Lawrence Scientific School in the fall of 1861. This was Charles Sanders Pierce.
--Part 3, Chapter 7, Section 1 - The Pierces
c) "Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions."
--Part 3, Chapter 7, Section 2 - The Peirces
message 11:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:47AM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
At this point we can also discuss any aspect that came before in the Preface, Chapters One through Chapter Six since these pages were previously discussed in the non spoiler threads that came before.
Mod
Peirce was one of the most creative and versatile intellectual figures of the last two centuries. Although his genius went largely unrecognized during his lifetime, his work has exerted a considerable influence on the development of philosophy and many other disciplines. In addition to his acknowledged role as one of the pioneers of pragmatism, formal logic, and philosophical sign theory, Peirce made groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, experimental psychology, cosmology, cartography, historiography, and the emerging field of computer science. Many treasures still wait to be unearthed from the rich corpus of the published and unpublished manuscripts of this seminal American mind.
message 13:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:53PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
An American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, statistics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics and Charles Sanders Pierce's father. He had five children:
*James Mills Peirce (1834–1906), who also taught mathematics at Harvard and succeeded to his father's professorship,
*Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a famous logician, polymath and philosopher,
*Benjamin Mills Peirce (1844–1870), who worked as a mining engineer before an early death,
*Helen Huntington Peirce Ellis (1845–1923), who married William Rogers Ellis, and
* Herbert Henry Davis Peirce (1849–1916), who pursued a career in the Foreign Service.
Young Benjamin Pierce - 1857
message 14:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 01:25PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Sarah Mills Peirce (c.1865)
(Source: [Fuente: Elisabeth Walther,
Charles Sanders Peirce: Leben und Werk,
Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1989, 23])
-Mother of Charles Sander Pierce - daughter of Elijah Hunt Mills who was a United States Senator of Massachusetts
message 15:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 01:43PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Louis Agassiz (seated) and Benjamin Peirce (standing and CSP's father) is pointing and indicating the global position of Harvard College.
message 16:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 01:45PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences
The painting by Albert Herter depicts President Abraham Lincoln and the signing of the Academy charter of March 3, 1863. Left to right: Benjamin Peirce, Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz, Lincoln, Senator Henry Wilson, Charles H. Davis, and Benjamin Apthorp Gould.
message 17:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:02PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
by Mary Crone Odekon
How do you explain the uses of astronomy? On a summer day in 1856 in Albany, New York, the answer was a two-hour manifesto by famed orator Edward Everett (remember him?).
Everett was not an astronomer. He had recently served as both President of Harvard University and US Secretary of State, and was the main oratorical heavyweight to mark the opening of a new observatory funded by heiress Blandina Bleecker Dudley.
He also delivered the Gettysburg Address -- not the succinct version of Abraham Lincoln, which was scheduled for the same day at the last minute, but the full-blown, two-hour main event.
The dedication of the Dudley Observatory, along with a new Geological Hall (inaugurated the previous day with a speech by Louis Agassiz that lasted only one hour), was part of an eight-day extravaganza of lectures linked to the tenth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Most prominent American scientists were in attendance, joined by political leaders, donors, and thousands of local citizens.
Everett is in the middle and is the orator:
The Dudley Observatory Dedication, 1857, by Tompkins H. Matteson. More than 160 portraits are combined in this painting, including Maria Mitchell, Benjamin Peirce, Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz, Millard Fillmore, and, of course, Edward Everett.
Credit: Albany Institute of History and Art.
High Resolution for a closer look: http://www.dudleyobservatory.org/Coll...
Also following an absolutely fascinating article about some of the men featured in this book and where they are in the painting along with other images - look at the High Resolution painting I provided for better clarity. The article also shows exactly where everybody was sitting and who they all were.
http://www.dudleyobservatory.org/Coll...
Mod
The great naturalist Louis Agassiz, the great mathematician and third superintendent of the Coast Survey Benjamin Peirce, and the former naval officer, hydrographic inspector and fourth superintendent of the Coast Survey Carlile P. Patterson.
Image ID: theb1202, NOAA's People Collection
message 19:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:22PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
The 1871 Hassler Expedition and Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz, Principal Investigator for the 1871 Hassler Expedition. (Photo: NOAA Photo Library)
In February 1871, Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard University received a most welcome letter from the Superintendent of the United States Coast Survey, Benjamin Pierce. Pierce congratulated Agassiz on regaining his health and added an exciting invitation: “Now, my dear friend, I have a very serious proposition for you. I am going to send a new iron steamer round to California in the course of the summer . . . .Would you go in her, and do deep-sea dredging all the way around?”
Dredging offered the best way for scientists to sample life at the sea bottom Agassiz had experience on Coast Survey vessels in this task. In 1869, he conducted experimental work in shallow waters off the Florida Keys. But what Pierce proposed for the upcoming Hassler Expedition represented science on a grander scale. The installation of new and improved dredges on the Coast Survey vessel Hassler, Pierce explained, would allow Agassiz to explore the sea at depths greater than scientists had ever gone before. Agassiz responded with enthusiasm. “Your proposition leaves me no rest . . . . I do not think anything more likely to have a lasting influence upon the progress of science was ever devised.” Despite precarious health and advancing age, Agassiz took on the challenging task of organizing and building financial and public support for what would prove the final expedition of his career.
In 1871, Louis Agassiz was among the most famous names in American Science. Born in Switzerland in 1807, he had earned doctorates in medicine and philosophy, and before the age of 30 held a prestigious teaching post at Lyceum of Neuchatel in Switzerland. His early work in comparative anatomy focused on the fossil record of fish.
He also branched out into the study of glaciers, and is known as the father of modern glaciology.
Agassiz promoted the theory of a catastrophic “ice age” when glaciers covered the early topography and life forms. In 1848, Agassiz assumed a professorship at Harvard University where his rare gifts as teacher, public speaker, and man of letters earned him the respect of colleagues and students and wide public esteem.
In 1859 he founded Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and four years later became a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences. By 1871, however, age and years of exhausting work, as well as the growing influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, had taken a heavy toll on Agassiz. In 1869 he suffered a physical breakdown that forced him into nearly two years of complete inactivity. With his physical strength returning, the Hassler Expedition seemed the perfect agent to restore his spirits and further bolster his lofty reputation.
Agassiz embraced the project with the highest hopes. In a letter preserved at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, he described the Hassler Expedition as potentially the most significant accomplishment in ocean science since the voyages of Captain Cook.
By probing the deepest depths, he expected to collect ancient life forms analogous to those he had studied in the fossil record. Privately, he had an additional agenda. Agassiz had long been a vocal critic of Darwin and his work. But as a true scientist, he kept his mind open to new possibilities and to the evidence supplied by the natural world. The voyage, he hoped, would provide him the time to consider “the whole Darwinian theory free from all external influences and former prejudices.”
In Annual Report of the Coast Survey for 1871, published at the beginning of the voyage, Superintendent Pierce paid homage to Agassiz and the Hassler Expedition: “The departure from sight and daily intimacy of that eminent man, upon a long and, it may be, perilous voyage, leaves a void which cannot be filled. But while the exploration intended is a consummation worthy of his great life, he alone is equal to the grandeur of the enterprise.”
The 1871 Expedition
On December 4, 1871, nearly six months later than originally projected, the Hassler slipped her mooring at Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard under the charge of Commander Philip C. Johnson, a naval officer of wide experience and excellent reputation.
Accompanying Agassiz was his wife Elizabeth, Thomas Hill—former President of Harvard, and L.F. Pourtales, a former Agassiz student in Switzerland and long time scientist with the Coast Survey.
Stormy winter weather forced the ship to lay at anchor for three days at Martha’s Vineyard. The delay provided time to properly stow equipment and transform the ship into something of a home. Elizabeth Agassiz made a particular effort to domesticate their cabin, adding a couch, a large arm chair, a portable table, and hanging a picture of their treasured house in Nahant. The presence of Commander Johnson’s wife added an additional level of feminine companionship not then associated with a Coast Survey voyage.
The expedition lasted eight long months, with the time punctuated by alternating periods of great wonder and crushing disappointment. Though at first the use of dredges was restricted to shallow and moderate depths, some of the results proved spectacular as suggested in a letter to Superintendent Pierce dated January 16, 1872:
I should have written to you from Barbadoes, but the day before we left the island was favorable for dredging, and our success in that line was so unexpectedly great, that I could not get away from the specimens, and made the most of them for study while I had the chance. We made only four hauls, in between seventy-five and one hundred and twenty fathoms. But what hauls! Enough to occupy half a dozen competent zoologists for a whole year, if the specimens could be kept fresh for that length of time.
L.F. Pourtales who prepared that official report of the expedition, also commented on the rich early harvests. He noted the great variety and volume of specimens, including “many forms heretofore unknown” as well as species that had been previously encountered at much greater depths in far distant waters. Pourtales also dutifully recorded the multiple failures of the newly developed equipment. Deepwater sounding apparatus failed repeated, the Hassler’s new steam engine manifested a variety of problems, the hull leaked, and later in the voyage all of the attempts at deepwater sampling failed when the hemp tow cables continually parted. Foul weather also made life on the Hassler miserable, especially early in the voyage. A long and narrow ship of fairly shallow draft, the Hassler rolled heavily in bad weather, especially when steaming rather than proceeding under sail. At one point in a storm off of the Caribbean the ship recorded a 42 degree roll. In an early private letter to Superintendent Pierce, Agassiz excoriated the vessel as “a complete failure.”
In truth, the brilliant Agassiz was a mercurial person whose moods shifted quickly. Much of the cruise went well. Agassiz, ever the teacher, presented lectures nearly every evening and took great delight in instructing the Hassler’s officers and crew about how to observe the natural world.
The Hassler Expedition certainly failed to meet the original high expectations of its sponsors and chief scientist. But, judged on its own merits, the expedition seems more successful. The ship explored the Magellan Strait—something that drew the praise and envy of Charles Darwin himself. They collected oceanographic and geographical data in a host of remote areas, and collected tens of thousands of specimens. Today more than 7,000 of these are catalogued at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, while still others went to the Smithsonian Institution and other natural history collections.
Although in private correspondence, Elizabeth Agassiz made clear her relief at the conclusion of the expedition, her published narrative captures moments of magic that occurred on the clean white science vessel. While off the Patagonian coast she recorded:
The Hassler left her anchorage on this desolate shore on an evening of singular beauty. It was difficulty to tell when she was on her way, so quietly did she move through the glassy waters, over which the sun went down in burnished gold, leaving the sky without a cloud. The light of the beach fires followed her till they too faded, and on the phosphorescence of the sea attended her into the night.
Of the Magellan Straight she wrote:
…the Hassler pursued her course, past a seemingly endless panorama of mountains and forests rising into the pale regions of snow and ice, where lay glaciers in which every rift and crevasse, as well as the many cascades flowing down to join the waters beneath, could be counted as she steamed by them. . . . These were weeks of exquisite delight to Agassiz. The vessel often skirted the shore so closely that its geology could be studied from the deck.
Ultimately, the Hassler Expedition’s goal of exploring the deepest reaches of the ocean went unrealized. The time available and experimental new technologies proved inadequate.
However, vast new areas were explored and a cadre of naval officers associated with the Coast Survey learned the principals of scientific observation at the feet of a man acknowledged as of one of the great teachers in the history of American natural science. The voyage concluded in early August 1872 when the thoroughly tested and improved Hassler took up formal duties as a Coast Survey ship.
Louis Agassiz lived but another year dreaming great dreams to the very end. He died on December 14, 1873. The museum he founded lives on as does the spirit of scientific inquiry he helped to foster in the U.S. Coast Survey.
Source: NOAA - http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/maritime/...)
Mod
Louis Agassiz, an influential Harvard professor and founder of the University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, was invited by Superintendent of the Survey Benjamin Pierce to lead a deep-sea dredging expedition to South America aboard the US Coast Survey Steamer Hassler. The Hassler circumnavigated South America and visited, among other locations, the Galapagos Islands. Agassiz investigated evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, collected deep-sea specimens to analyze their relation to the fossil forms of earlier eras, and observed the glaciers and moraines of the southern Andes. Count L. F. Pourtalès directed the dredging operations, Franz Steindachner oversaw specimen collection, former Harvard President Thomas Hill served as a physicist, and J. H. Blake served as artist, documenting the expedition. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz accompanied her husband on the trip and published her account of the expedition in newspapers.
Holder, Charles Frederick. Louis Agassiz :his life and work. New York : G.P. Putnam's sons, 1893.
by Charles Frederick Holder (no photo)Here is the above free: (complements of Harvard University Library)
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/9...
message 21:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:32PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Here is the above free: (complements of Harvard University Library)
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/1...
Mod
And source with more and interesting information:
http://www.botany.si.edu/colls/expedi...
message 24:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 02:46PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
1818-1891
Botanist on the U.S. Hassler Expedition (1871-1872) - also serving as the physician on board
Thomas Hill accompanied his friend, Louis Agassiz, on the Hassler Expedition to the South American seas. Hill never received formal training in the field of botany, but his father taught all of his children the scientific names of plants at a very early age. While on the Hassler Expedition, Hill followed the orders of Agassiz and was able to collect many algal species from the Straits of Magellan and along the coast of Brazil. Hill's lack of formal botanical training was evident on the voyage. Agassiz explained that the specimens were, "usually rather roughly prepared, different kinds being mounted indiscriminately together on course paper, without very complete data, but many samples were in fair quantity." Prior to accompanying the crew of the Hassler to South America, Hill had been very ill and was forced to resign as Harvard University President. However, Hill claims that the voyage miraculously restored his health.
Other Accomplishments:
-Received Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University (1838)
-Received Divinity Degree from the Harvard Divinity School (1845)
-Worked as a pastor in Waltham, Massachusetts (1845-1859)
-Served as President of Harvard (1862-1868)
- Accepted the ministry position at the First Church in Portland, Maine, where he would remain working for the next 18 years (1873)
Mod
Louis F. de Pourtales
More: http://neptunesneedle.wikischolars.co....
Mod
1809: Charles Darwin (British naturalist, proposed theory of evolution via natural selection)
message 27:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:26PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Asa Gray
Here is a review of Darwin's Origin of Species by Asa Gray at the time: (published in The Atlantic JUL 1 1860, 12:00 PM ET) - very interesting)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...
This is from Wired - Interesting article:
How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray
BY DAVID DOBBS - 04.28.1112:10 PM
The history of science lives. Today it came to life over at the Atlantic, which just posted a key document in the fight over Darwin’s theory of evolution: a review of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, which originally ran in the Atlantic in July 1860.
Gray’s review provided a pivotal victory for Darwin: It gave his highly controversial theory, which he had published the previous December, the support of one of America’s most respected scientists. Gray proved a key and effective advocate for Darwin in the U.S., especially during 1860, when he thrice defeated in debate America’s most prominent scientist, the zoologist Louis Agassiz.
Agassiz, a creationist, resisted Darwin’s theory ferociously. He did so both because he disagreed and because he himself had become the country’s most famous scientist by beautifully articulating a vision of species as works of God. He had built his career on this vision. He knew he had to defeat Darwin or go down himself.
He lost, however, and the defeat started with the 1860 debates with Gray. Gray, however, unlike the UK’s Thomas Huxley, aka “Darwin’s bulldog,” was not a pugnacious sort — not one to argue with archbishops. Rather he was a devout Christian who, as late as 1858, believed in pretty much the sort of static, God’s-order vision of species that Louis Agassiz promoted. But in a remarkable series of inquiries in 1858 and 1859, Darwin led Gray to his view.
The passage below tells how he did so. It’s from Chapter 5 of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral — a book about another long argument in the 19th century, that over the origin of coral reefs, which paralleled and in many cases inverted the argument over the origin of species. In the small story of Gray’s seduction, as in the two big sweeping stories of which it is part, ideas travel long arcs and sometimes strike, smack in the back of the head, the people who let them go.
__
After Darwin’s book came out in late 1859, Louis mounted an all-or-nothing attack on it. He waged his war on two fronts — one among peers, another in the popular press and lecture circuit. Louis actually won a draw on the popular front, at least in the United States, for most Americans chose the straddle mentioned earlier. Even 150 years later, over half of Americans continued to believe that God either created most species as is or somehow directs evolution.
This happy stance ignores, of course, the philosophical implications that haunted Darwin, and it overlooks the underlying disagreement about how one should seek answers. Louis’s idealist logic and Darwin’s empirical method clashed as violently as did their creationist and mechanistic conclusions. For scientists of the era — a time when science was self-consciously moving toward an empirical stance — this argument about method mattered as much as whether we arose from God or monkey. It was this methodological debate that Louis so decisively lost.
A debate, of course, requires an opponent, and even Darwin couldn’t argue effectively from across the Atlantic. He didn’t much like arguing anyway, preferring to sway through his writing while friends did the knifework. In England, Thomas Huxley, self-anointed as “Darwin’s bulldog,” did the bloodiest of it. Huxley won an early and instantly famous debate over Darwinism even though his opponent, the former Oxford debater Archbishop Wilberforce, fired the most memorable salvo of the entire long war: In June 1860, before an excited crowd at Oxford, Wilberforce wrapped up his creationist attack on Origin by asking Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he descended from a monkey. The agnostic Huxley, murmuring to a friend that “The Lord hath delivered him unto my hands,” rose, rubbing those hands together, and dismantled the archbishop’s argument. He finished by declaring that if given the choice between kinship to a smelly ape or to a man willing to use his intelligence and privilege to twist the truth, he would choose the ape. The packed hall erupted in shouting; one woman reportedly fainted.
Darwin’s American advocate was less flashy. The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, it will be recalled, was among those who warmly welcomed Louis Agassiz to America. Far less outgoing than Louis (he preferred doing taxonomy to lecturing about it), Gray, at Harvard since 1842, had won eminence through solid work, lucid writing, and judicious promotion of rigorous science. As charmed as most by Louis’s high spirits and dazzling talk, he had accompanied him on his first trip to Philadelphia and Washington in 1846 to introduce him to the country’s scientific establishment. He was thrilled when Agassiz joined the Harvard faculty, inviting him to dinner several times to meet new colleagues. Louis would often stay late at these dinners as he and Gray talked deep into the night. Their rapport seemed to promise long allegiance.
But the two differed on numerous points over the next 15 years. In the mid-1850s, at a time when the issues of race and slavery repeatedly took the United States to the brink of civil war, Gray was disgusted to see Louis offer scientific views in support of racist arguments. Louis held that different human races, like similar but different animal species, had been created separately — and none too equally. This theory conflicted with both Gray’s growing scientific belief in species descent and his Christian belief in humankind’s common origin.
Gray also favored a more egalitarian, less authoritarian educational model than Agassiz did, and the two clashed repeatedly over how to shape the growing university. Similarly, Louis (along with Ben Peirce, who had delighted in being called a nabob) favored an elitist, invitation-only structure in scientific organizations, while Gray, his geologist friend James Dwight Dana of Yale, and many others preferred a more open, democratic structure based on interest and commitment. And Gray, despite himself, resented that Louis garnered unprecedented attention and funding while he struggled to raise enough money to replace pickets in the botanical garden’s fence. Gray, Dana, and others also felt that Louis’s pursuit of fame, funding, and lecture opportunities was leading him to practice sloppy science and oversimplify its results. His love of popular lecturing “has greatly injured him,” Gray complained at one point, leading him to “tamper with strict veracity for the sake of popular effect.” These resentments sharpened in 1858 when Louis sent an article to the American Journal of Science expressing support for a book of one of his protégés, Jules Marcou, that harshly attacked the work of Gray’s friend James Dwight Dana (who happened to edit the Journal) and other American geologists — and insisted that his letter be printed even though he had not read the book it praised. After consulting Gray, Dana printed Louis’s letter along with a rejoinder and a note explaining the whole affair.
All this accrued to quite a pile of bother. But what irked Gray most — more every year — was that the view of species Louis sold so effectively was idealist rather than empirical.
Gray had once held views rather idealist himself, even while professing empiricism XE “empiricism: held by Asa Gray” . This was actually a common stance among scientists in the mid-nineteenth century, as a growing commitment to empiricism eroded various idealist assumptions and approaches. The year Agassiz arrived in America, for instance (1846), Gray reviewed a controversial work called A Sequel to the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation that espoused a roughly Lamarckian theory of evolution. (Louis’s Lowell lectures the following winter were partly a response to the same book.) Gray panned Vestiges, attacking its shoddy science and concluding that its unproven Lamarckian evolutionary scheme must be rejected because the “unity we perceive in nature” is one to which “sound science has ever delighted to point, as the proof that all is the direct handiwork of a single omniscient Creator.” As yet, Gray wrote, those arguing that species arise any other way “are bound to show that natural agencies are competent to produce such results …. The burden of proof rests upon them.” This could easily have been Louis talking.
For Gray, however, the burden of proof would soon shift — or, more to the point, it would apply as much to speculative religious explanations as to speculative evolutionary theories. During the 1850s, Gray grew ever more self-consciously empiricist. He would increasingly insist that theories correspond first and foremost with observable evidence. Though he was more conscientious about this than most, he was hardly alone. He was simply helping to push a more rigorous empiricism.
Gray would only take this so far. He was among the few to immediately accept the theory of natural selection. Yet he would not admit its ruthlessly mechanistic implications (or those of the larger evolutionary theory). Instead he chose to believe, as would so many after him, not only that God had created life in some manner “lost in the mists of time” but that in some similarly unknowable manner He now directed the selective process. Thus Gray conceded to his devout Christianity — yielding, as he saw it, in an arena beyond the knowable.
Otherwise, however, Gray viewed religious or abstract explanations warily. He trusted instead the literal and demonstrable. In the 1850s, as Agassiz’s idealist preachings began to grate, Gray found support for his empiricism in his friendship with several English naturalists, most notably Joseph Hooker, the eminent and well-traveled botanist who directed the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew. Gray had met Hooker while visiting England in the late 1830s, and since then the two, frequently corresponding, had pioneered the subdiscipline of plant geography. Like Darwin’s and others’ close attention to the distribution of animal species, their study of the geographical distribution of plants would reveal much about evolution’s dynamics. For now, pre-Origin, their efforts were notable for their empirical tenor: a broadening enquiry, ever tied to direct evidence, into why plant species were distributed as they were.
message 28:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:09PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Hooker and the other British scientists Gray corresponded with — all friends of Darwin — tried to practice the no-nonsense empiricism first articulated by their countryman John Locke a century before and elaborated in the early to mid-1800s by the British philosopher-scientists William Whewell and John Stuart Mill. Gray, besieged by Louis’s idealist spinnings as well as by the transcendentalism then being spangled about by Emerson, Thoreau, and their followers, was glad to find such literal-mindedness in scientists so respected and prominent. By the late 1850s he was ready to let empiricism override not only speculative evolutionary schema such as that of Vestiges but creationist elaborations such as Louis’s.
After all, both made the same sort of unfounded conceptual jump — exciting but ultimately unsupportable — that left one standing on air. As he put it to Joseph Hooker in 1858, “[I] sympathize more with & estimate higher the slow induction that leads step by step to sound conclusions so far as they go, than the bolder flights of the genius which so often leads the possessor to mount three pairs of steps only to jump out of the garret window.”
*
What brought Gray to ground was a botanical conundrum. As early as the 1840s, Gray had noted that eastern North America and eastern Asia, especially Japan, both hosted many plants found nowhere else. Identical or closely similar species were growing a world apart. Forty plant genera existed only in these two areas. He noted this oddity in print several times but lacked time to examine it closely.
In 1855, however, a new pen pal revived his interest in the puzzle. Charles Darwin, drawing on their mutual friendship with Joseph Hooker (and having admired a letter that Gray sent to Hooker regarding plant geography), wrote Gray asking for help in solving some plant-species distribution problems he was struggling with. As always, Darwin was humble, solicitous — and subversively Socratic, even while fishing for information he genuinely needed.
As I am no Botanist, it will seem so absurd to you my asking botanical questions, that I may premise that I have for several years been collecting facts on “variation,” and when I find that any general remark seems to hold amongst animals, I try to test it in Plants.
Though Darwin in this particular letter asked about differences among North American alpine plants, his confession to testing ideas on “variation” against Gray’s plant data sums up the course of their ensuing correspondence. Their exchanges would greatly strengthen Darwin’s theories even as he sold them to Gray.
It wasn’t by accident. At the time Hooker re-introduced Darwin and Gray (who had met briefly when Gray toured England in 1838), he was one of just two people to whom Darwin had confessed his theory of evolution. (Charles Lyell was the other.) Hooker and Darwin had corresponded extensively about how anomalies of plant distribution seemed to support Darwin’s ideas about species change. Like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, plant species on nearby islands often took closely similar forms that suggested descent from common ancestors. Hooker had seen this in the plants Darwin brought back from the Galapagos, and he had noted many similarities in plant communities in the European Alps and the Arctic, as if those two flora had once shared a single habitat and then been separated. Hooker recognized that Gray’s eastern North American – east Asia conundrum offered a similar puzzle — and that if Darwin’s theory helped Gray solve it, it would strengthen Darwin’s theory and win him an important ally. He set the two men up knowing damn well what he was doing.
For two years, then, Darwin — humble, politic, and also knowing damn well — plied Gray with questions about plant distribution problems in North America, and particularly about the eastern U.S.-East Asia puzzle, that led Gray to consider more deeply the possible links between species distribution and “variation,” or species change. Darwin’s intriguing questions, modest suggestions, and requests for clarification helped Gray see much about plant geography that, short of an Agassizian leap of faith in divine creation, seemed explainable only by some mechanism of transmutation.
It was a brilliant strategy, convincing Gray not by rhetoric but by enticing him to reconsider the evidence on his own lab tables. Gray saw he was being led, and he gathered from Hooker that Darwin was nursing some new evolutionary theory. He recognized that one of his most important tenets — “like breeds like” — was being challenged. Yet he allowed it. For Gray’s belief in species fixity stemmed less from religious or essentialist principles than from empirical observation. His thousands of hours classifying plant specimens had convinced him that if species were not fixed — if species boundaries could be easily and often crossed — then the order he perceived in his many specimens would have broken down long ago, and he would not find the fairly clear distinctions he saw daily. He believed in species fixity, in short, because it seemed to confirm what he saw. But as a belief based on observation, he held it open to revision. By the late 1850s he had already softened this belief, for he knew Hooker and others were questioning it and he himself saw growing evidence that species varied so much as to stretch their own boundaries. Many specimens seemed to lie right on species boundaries. The question was what “natural agency,” to use the terms with which he’d skewered Vestiges, might “be competent to produce such results.” Hooker’s hints that Darwin was pondering such an agency did not surprise him.
Finally, in July 1857, Darwin fessed up. With a short letter followed by an abstract, he made Gray the third confidante to know of his theory of evolution, including his ideas on natural selection. His letter was typically humble and disarming. He offered his ideas as admittedly blasphemous and doubtless flawed while making clear the key mechanism — the selection and amplification of advantageous traits through greater survival and reproductive rates of the individuals who happened to inherit them — that elevated his above previous transmutation theories. The following summer, Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (who had finally scared the cautious Darwin into publishing by writing him of his own similar theory) published their short papers in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, providing a slightly fuller explanation and making his theory a matter of record.
Gray was at first cautiously receptive about Darwin’s theory, then increasingly convinced. The logic seemed sound. Even if Darwin himself worried aloud to Gray (somewhat in the manner of one looking to have an insecurity contradicted) that this theory was “grievously hypothetical,” it nevertheless made an empirical argument based on a natural process rather than a supernatural one. It thus appealed to Gray’s empiricism. But what truly sold Gray, in those months between Darwin’s private confession of the theory and his publication of it more fully in the Linnean Society papers and then Origin, was the light the theory shed on the Japan-North America pattern Gray had long been pondering.
Gray’s Japan-North America findings presented an obvious but difficult puzzle: How did such a large group of identical or nearly identical species come to exist only in two areas far apart? Nearby islands, of course, often shared closely similar plant communities; but that was easily explained by the idea that the islands had once been high points on a single land mass that sank. That didn’t seem to apply to Asia and North America.
Gray, however, applied something very close to that explanation, solving the puzzle by essentially treating the two great continents as islands formerly joined. Though this seems routine in our post-plate-tectonics era, it was a big leap at the time. In one of the boomerang-like ironies that careened through the contradiction-filled air around Louis Agassiz, Gray connected and disconnected the two continents by using Louis’s Ice Age theory. Using a hypothesis Hooker had employed with good results to European alpine flora, Gray proposed that in the warm part of the Tertiary period, a single temperate flora had spread unbroken across the northern reaches of Asia and North America — unbroken, he asserted, because the two continents had then shared a land bridge across the Bering Strait. This band of flora lay well north of what later became Japan and eastern North America. When the next Ice Age came, however, the cooling climate pushed these plant communities southward, splitting them, as they moved down either side of the Pacific, into separate communities in North America and eastern Asia. Subsequent climate changes, such as the increasing dryness of the American West, then drove the two communities into the more limited areas found by Gray’s time.
This explanation was not exactly innocent of speculation. Even so, it was far more empirical than the notion that God arbitrarily placed identical species in two places a world apart. But a puzzle remained. If these two communities were remnants of a former single community, why were some of the species closely similar but not identical?
Enter Darwin’s new theory. In Gray’s paper, drafted and refined over late 1858 and early 1859, he accepted and employed, gingerly but quite clearly, Darwin’s notion (as Darwin put it in his original letter of confession to Gray) that species “are only strongly defined varieties” that rose from an ancestor species. In the millennia since the two plant populations separated, he explained, some of the species had diverged enough to become taxonomically distinct from their cousins across the Pacific.
Gray’s Japan paper still stands as a thoughtful, creative, and bold piece of work and a pioneering piece of biogeography. Along with Hooker’s papers, it was one of the first to use Darwin’s theory in the way it would so often be used later — to explain the anomalies of species distribution. For Gray, the paper confirmed not only the strength of Darwin’s theory but the obsolescence of Agassiz’s. He realized the Japan paper armed him well to challenge Agassiz, for it contradicted virtually every aspect of Louis’s view of species creation and order. It even used Agassiz’s own Ice Age theory — his most solid piece of work, as Gray saw it — against him in a way sure to heighten the contrast between Louis’s idealism and Gray’s empiricism. For Gray described the Ice Age not as a sudden holocaust erasing all life so God could start over, but in a more restrained sense, as a gradual natural event that pushed species around rather than wiping them out wholesale.
With the publication of Origin soon to come, Gray sensed the time was ripe to dethrone Agassiz and relieve American science of his speculative, idealist vision. Gray had no idea that the Darwinian theory he incorporated into his Japan theory would turn the world upside down. But he saw full well that it might upend Louis.
Gray chose a friendly forum in which to first air his ideas, reading an early version of the paper at a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Society, a small club of which both he and Agassiz were members, on December 10, 1858. This was a full year before Origin was published, though several months after the Darwin and Wallace papers had been read at the Linnean Society in London.
message 29:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:11PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
While no transcript of the talk survives, notes from attendees suggest that Gray (like Darwin a rather cautious revolutionary) presented his ideas on species drift in language of a delicacy similar to that which he used a few months later in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a footnote within that published version, Gray asserted that Darwin’s theory would resolve the “fundamental and most difficult question remaining in natural history” and predicted it would hold “a prominent part in all future investigations into the distribution and probable origin of species.” But he described the actual theory of variation and new species creation in fairly tentative language, writing that “the limits of occasional variation in species … are wider than is generally supposed, and … derivative forms when segregated may be as constantly reproduced as their originals” — in other words, variations might become new species. Whether the listener would infer those other words — or even read the footnote — was left to chance. As for the Cambridge Society meeting, Gray appears to have drawn on Darwin’s speciation theory only enough to help explain his solution to the Japan-North America plant distribution puzzle.
Gray wrote a friend afterwards that Louis took the presentation “very well indeed”. In fact, Louis, distracted by museum matters at the time, seemed to miss how large an issue Gray was raising. Gray, however, felt emboldened. He immediately arranged to read the paper before a fuller, more important audience at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences meeting the following month. There, he wrote his friend Henry Torrey in New York, he would “knock out the underpinning of Agassiz’s theories about species and their origin [by] turning Agassiz’s own guns [i.e., his Ice Age theory as well as much of his data on species distribution] against him.” When the meeting came, Gray was indeed more bold. He spoke for more than an hour, laying out his paper’s argument and stating explicitly that its view of species distribution, creation, and variability directly contradicted the theory of species distribution and fixity offered by Agassiz — which theory, as Gray put it, “offers no scientific explanation of the present distribution of species over the globe; but simply supersedes explanation, by affirming, that as things now are, so they were at the beginning; whereas the facts of the case … appear to demand from science something more than a direct reference of the phenomena as they are to the Divine will.”
If Louis had missed the directness of Gray’s challenge before, he certainly saw it now. Gray stood before a room of peers accusing him of pseudoscience. Louis, perhaps sensing explosive ground, was uncharacteristically measured in response. In a half-hour deflection maneuver he declined to rebut Gray’s botanical argument by pleading knowledge mainly of zoology — which knowledge he then drew on to reaffirm his position and deny, without addressing the evidence just presented, that climate affected species distribution.
Perhaps recognizing he had not quite risen to the occasion, Louis proposed at the next Academy of Arts and Sciences meeting, two weeks later, that this subject of species origin be pursued in a series of “discussions.” His old friend Ben Peirce, perhaps hoping to rally the sort of crowd before which Louis usually prevailed, moved that the meetings be open to the general public. (Peirce’s and Agassiz’s feelings on exclusivity softened when convenient.) The rest of the group agreed. And so a showdown was arranged, and the public meetings scheduled, and over the months ahead, in a series of three debates, Gray and Agassiz fired the first shots in what would become a loud and long war.
It is one of history’s minor oddities that nobody saw it that way at the time — so complete was the resistance to Darwin’s idea. Everyone at the meetings saw that Agassiz was being challenged, but they missed that a common, fundamental view of the world was also under fire. The two men debated monthly through that winter and spring, at Academy meetings in February, March, and April and then at a May meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Club at Gray’s garden house. A couple times the debate started from the Japan paper, and at least once it started from Louis’s presentation, yet again, of his “Plan of Creation” lecture. Gray was more explicit and pejorative every time about the difference in views and methods being presented, repeatedly contrasting his view of species distribution and creation to Agassiz’s, which he said was so speculative and idealist that it “remove[s] the whole question out of the field of inductive science.” Finally, at a May meeting, in the cozier forum of a Cambridge Scientific Club held in his own garden house, Gray let the big cat out of the bag. “To see how it would strike a dozen people of varied minds and habits of thought, and partly, I confess, maliciously to vex the soul of Agassiz with views so diametrically opposed to all his pet notions,” he explicated Darwin’s theory directly, summarizing and reading parts from Darwin’s Linnean Society paper and the abstract Darwin had sent him, presenting plainly Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection and noting once again that this view of species creation directly contradicted Louis’s idealist vision.
Well there, Gray must have thought; that should do it. Yet even now no one seemed to see how huge a door was swinging on the small hinge of these debates. None seemed to note, for example, the distinction that Darwin’s insight about natural selection gave his theory; they instead likened it to Lamarck’s. Everyone seemed to see the debate as a lively but essentially routine academic spat.
The seeming thick-headedness of Gray’s Cambridge audiences was almost surely due to the deeply subversive nature of Darwin’s thinking. It would take the 600 pages of Origin, with its agile argument wielding a huge weight of evidence, to convince them of evolution and common descent, and decades more before the frighteningly mechanistic natural selection theory took hold. It would take the inflamed, post-publication shouting of religious rebutters and self-styled Darwinian agnostics to highlight the philosophical and religious differences between the two views. Gray wasn’t about to get such work done in a few evenings’ repartee with Louis.
Doubtless the attendees were also partly fooled by the debaters’ collegiality. A friendly decorum prevailed at these meetings; the two were, after all, neighbors. Gray, despite his directness and his deep, long resentments, was his usual polite self, and Louis, a bit uncertain on this new ground and perhaps not wanting to start a shooting war, remained gracious in response. The gladiatorial atmosphere of the Huxley-Wilberforce showdown never took hold. On the contrary, these meetings in the spring of 1859 — before the publication of Origin, before the infamous Huxley rejoinder, before America’s religionists started feuding with America’s scientific rebels and agnostics, before, in short, Darwin’s book ignited a popular controversy — witnessed perhaps the last sustained congeniality between two colleagues who had once approached close friendship and now faced each other across an opening abyss. Both still behaved as if their collegiality could span the rift — as if their differences could be raised, explored, summarized, and then set aside like most scientific and philosophical discussions, and that life and work (as Gray perhaps feared and Agassiz surely hoped) would continue as before.
But if the audience seemed to miss the depth of the opening chasm, the participants did not. After the last of the debates, the one held in May at the garden house where they had once shared long dinners, Agassiz told his colleague, “Gray, we must stop this.” Gray would remember the words even twenty years later.
message 30:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:14PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
*
A few weeks after that last May meeting, Louis sailed to Europe for a long-planned and much-needed vacation, creating a ceasefire in the debate with Gray. When Louis returned in late September, things stayed quiet, as Louis resumed teaching and organizing the new museum.
Almost as soon as the first copies of Origin arrived around Christmas, however, Agassiz could see that this debate would not stop. Darwin’s book — engaging and accessible but supported by broad knowledge and compelling detail — was the buzz not only of scientific but of wider literary and academic circles, exciting discussion among the same milieu Louis had once effortlessly dominated. It immediately sold well, with a full print run of 1750 copies sold in the U.S. by May 1 — a stunning distribution then for a book of science. Several of Agassiz’s students read the book in the weeks after its publication, as did others in the close Harvard community. Harvard aesthetics professor Charles Eliot Norton, for instance, wrote a friend that he, the eminent Harvard zoologist Jeffries Wyman, the poet James Lowell (an Agassiz friend), and the historian Henry Torrey met excitedly the day after Christmas and “grew warm” discussing the book, recognizing immediately that “if Darwin is right, Agassiz is wrong.”
Louis recognized this too. And now, rested from his trip, invigorated by the enthusiasm of his new students and the possibilities his new museum offered to buttress his case, he took up anew the job of refuting Darwin’s folly.
Doing so proved maddeningly difficult. Darwin was like a punchy clown you could not knock down. At the January 1860 meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Louis reasserted the fixity of species by trying to refute any relationship between Tertiary-period seashell fossils and present forms — but was soundly contradicted by William Barton Rogers, a prominent geologist who was then starting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ben Peirce called for another a series of discussions, but his friend fared even worse this time around. In early March Louis tried to move the fight from Gray’s turf to his own by asserting that “varieties, properly so called, have no existence, at least in the animal kingdom,” and at a meeting two weeks later, in a sort of surprise managerial move, he sent in a couple subs — a Harvard philosophy professor defending tenets of essentialism and Louis’s old benefactor John Avery Lowell, the textile magnate — to attack Darwin on philosophical and religious grounds. Louis’s use of a businessman to forward a scientific debate suggests his growing desperation. (Darwin, reading a review of Origin that Lowell subsequently published, noted “it is clear [Lowell] is not [a] naturalist”.) Yet Louis had method in this madness, for Lowell was the dominant member of the Harvard Corporation, and his active opposition to Darwin carried an implicit warning to Gray about job security. But Gray, ignoring both the zoological bait and the veiled threat, countered the next month by using a wealth of botanical data to show not only that variations existed in nature but that natural selection retained and amplified them. Meanwhile another debate series had sprung up at the Boston Society of Natural History, where Louis, rushing from one front to another, found himself again outflanked by the geologist William Rogers. Rogers, a charismatic lecturer himself, had transmuted into a sort of American Huxley, repeatedly turning Louis’s paleontological and Ice Age research (as well as his own vast geological and paleontological knowledge) against him. These Boston Society of Natural History meetings provided an extra dimension of aggravation and humiliation (not to mention a disturbing sign of things to come) when some of Louis’s own students asked provocative questions that fanned the debate hotter.
None of these contretemps were true scientific debates. They were rhetorical battles in which a new argument confronted a wall of stubbornly repeated assertions. Gray pointed this out in a long, lucid, and measured review of Origin of Species in the March issue of American Journal of Science. Playing the dispassionate arbiter, he contrasted Darwin’s view of species with Agassiz’s. While Charles Darwin saw facts of nature as “complex facts, to be analyzed and interpreted scientifically” and “view[ed] them in their relations to one another, and endeavors to explain them as far as he can … through natural causes,” Louis Agassiz treated the facts of nature as “ultimate facts [to be] interpreted theologically” and viewed them “only in their supposed relation to the Divine mind.” Darwin’s theory of species, despite some flaws Gray perceived, was “a legitimate attempt to extend the domain of natural or physical science.” Louis’s theory, on the other hand, was “theistic to excess.” Though the tone was slightly more tactful, the message was as a year before: What Louis Agassiz did could not be called science. Gray would send the same message to an even wider audience in a three-part article on Origin in the July, August, and September of the Atlantic. This Atlantic series extended the debate into the popular realm and, given that the Atlantic was owned and edited by good friends of Louis, spoke volumes about how far the center of debate had moved in just six months.
Louis, meanwhile, dragged his feet in providing a written critique of Origin. He promised to send one to the American Journal of Science by early February but did not deliver, prompting Gray to write Hooker that
Agassiz has again failed to provide his promised criticism on Darwin for [the] Jour[nal] after promising it over and over…. [He has] failed because [of] the poor stuff— as everybody calls it — he has been pouring out at the Academy. I do not wonder that he hesitates to commit himself to print. I really think his mind has deteriorated within a few years.
When Louis’s first printed rebuttal of Darwin finally appeared in the July 1860 American Journal of Science, it seemed to confirm that he would rather stubbornly defend an idealist vision than undertake the critical thinking of science. Ostensibly a review of Origin, the piece was really an expanded version of a chapter from his own Contributions to the Natural History of the United States in which he re-rehashed his Plan of Creation scheme. Here he stated — proudly, as if this proved Darwinism’s falsity — that “the arguments presented by Darwin … have not made the slightest impression on my mind.” Darwin’s evolutionary theory was a “scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency.”
Yet Louis could not so convince his colleagues. They had read Darwin’s book, talked about it extensively, and saw it was no Vestiges. While many scientists first received Darwin’s theory guardedly, few rejected it outright. They saw Darwin’s empirical basis, respected the voluminous evidence he marshaled, and admired the lucid power of his argument. By trying to dispose wholesale of this engaging new theory, Louis exposed his close-mindedness and a hostility to his discipline’s inquisitive, empirical basis. Should someone who so proudly closed his mind to a productive idea stand as an icon of American science? More and more colleagues thought not.
So began the collapse of Louis’s high tower. Long weakened by rust, the thing began to crumble. Louis, sensing he was losing the scientific battle, fought a rear-guard action writing for popular magazines, lecturing, and building the museum, whose collections, he felt sure, would yet prove Darwin wrong. He wrote his own piece for the Atlantic, rebutting Gray and Darwin; gave yet another series of Lowell lectures on his Plan of Creation, which he soon published as a book (Methods of Natural Study) that went through several printings; gave a variation on that lecture series in New York, which he also soon published in book form; and then composed a entire series of a dozen articles for the Atlantic that were also soon printed as a book Between 1861 and 1866 he gave scores of lectures and published four books and twenty-one articles — almost all in the popular press — asserting his special brand of special creationism. Yet even as he fought, he fell. He retained virtually no scientific allies. Most of his Harvard colleagues (as well as the Massachusetts legislature) continued to support the museum, and the scientific community continued to recognize the great value of his taxonomic and curatorial work. But as a theoretician, Louis walked alone. As he recognized himself by writing only for the popular press, the scientific debate had moved on. His own students were questioning and deserting him. Colleagues grew less deferential. He began suffering political reversals. Members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences — a group that Louis had long dominated — began siding with Gray on political matters, and in 1863 they elected Gray president and William Rogers secretary.
Louis’s most searing defeat came at the 1864 meeting of a new scientific group he had helped found only the year before, the National Academy of Sciences (or NAS — a new, national organization unrelated to the Boston-based Academy of Arts and Sciences). The 1864 NAS meeting took place in New Haven, a location that should have warned Louis of trouble, for New Haven was home to Yale geologist James Dwight Dana, the Gray ally and American Journal of Science editor who had been attacked by Jules Marcou with Louis’s support. But Louis felt confident, for it was only the year before that he, Peirce, and their closet scientific allies, having had their elitist agenda rebuffed at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, had founded the National Academy of Sciences specifically to emulate the elite, election-only French academies Louis adored. The new Academy’s elitist function seemed confirmed by its designation as the federal government’s official scientific advisor. Membership was limited to fifty internally elected members, and since Louis, Peirce, and their allies had hand-picked most of the original forty-nine, they figured to control subsequent entries, including the addition of the fiftieth member, which was part of the business for the 1864 meeting. But the New Haven meeting (only the organization’s second) brought a stunning reversal when Gray, Dana, and a few allies, using a slippery, last-minute switch of career geologist Dana to the organization’s zoology section so he could cast a deciding nominating vote within that section, managed to give the fiftieth spot to Smithsonian Institute director Spencer Baird — a man whom Louis hated because he lent Louis specimens only reluctantly and, worse, had once hired a defecting Agassiz assistant. Louis was livid. Gray had outmaneuvered, outvoted, and embarrassed him in the elitist political structure that he himself had founded. The incident starkly lit his fall from power. On the train back to Boston he confronted Gray, calling him “no gentleman” and apparently other words less printable, insulting Gray so deeply that the two would not speak again for several years. Back in Cambridge Agassiz complained widely, and rumor spread that he had challenged Gray to a duel. (Swords, presumably.) Had he received such a challenge, Gray, even were he not pacific to begin with, would surely have declined. He had already won.
message 31:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:24PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
I have provided the above articles and excerpts because there is a lot left out about the background of the scientific and philosophical struggles going on during this period and I felt it might have been difficult for you to follow in these last two chapters.
I think the above identifies the scientific sides of the scientific/philosophical beliefs held on the origin of man and various minorities during that day and how they evolved.
These men were not quacks - but very, very smart and educated and gentlemen who held these beliefs and in addition these beliefs were wide spread.
So when reading about what a person or a president of that time period said or wrote - one must understand what the thinking and scientific thought happened to be at that time even though it was shortsighted, fallacious, ignorant or much worse.
But these men did not view themselves as racially biased whatsoever and that is the issue - they thought that they were scientifically correct and that they were listening to the best minds express their theories (such as they were).
Mod
by David Dobbs (no photo)
Mod
by A. Hunter Dupree (no cover)
by Edward Lurie (no photo)This is a tremendous source on Darwin which he also used: (Darwin Correspondence Project)
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwin...
And here is another chapter from Dobbs book he published in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/201...
Source: Wired
message 34:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 03:38PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/...
http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/...
Asa Gray
I haven't read this chapter yet, and I'm going out of town over the weekend. I look forward to trying to catch up when I get back (your research is extensive, Bentley!). I will say that my overall reaction when I finished the chapter on Brazil -- another amazing chapter -- was to silently cheer the whole concept of free will. I have also decided to read more of Henry James, & downloaded Portrait of a Lady and Wings of a Dove.
by
Henry James
also by
Henry James
message 36:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 04:24PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
With the posts that I make - I try to synthesize the material that you read and help everyone collectively put together the puzzle pieces - especially if your background is not in philosophy or scientific thought and theories.
These families - Holmes-James-Pierce-Emerson-Alcott, etc are so prolific and so deep in accomplishment.
Mod
Questions to Consider and Discuss:
We may want to start discussing this recurrent theme among the father and son pairs that we have encountered thus far - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and his father the Senior - William James and his father and now Charles Sanders Peirce and his father Benjamin.
It was interesting that James recorded in his class notebook remarks that Peirce made that he found provocative like - "He makes a test of any man's right to write upon freedom that he explain the authority of a Father over his child." James and Peirce probably were interested in the metaphysics of the relations between fathers and sons.
But Charles was different in a sense because he did not want to distance himself from his father's views like Oliver Wendell Holmes or William James.
What are the struggles that father and sons have that you felt have been evident in these three pairs? And what are the similarities and some of the differences and did a successful dynamic father contribute to issues with the son?
Why or why not?
Mod
Questions to Consider and Discuss:
What constituted being a Bhahmin? Were there certain characteristics or background necessary to be classified in that group? Who qualified and who did not?
Louis Menand wrote: The Peirces were not quite Brahmins in Dr. Holmes's definition of the term - they were not a line of scholars - but they had been in Massachusetts since the early seventeenth century (the name was English, and originally spelled "Pers"), and they had been associated with Harvard since 1826, which is the year Benjamin Peirce's father, also Benjamin, quit the family business in Salem (it was about to go broke anyway) and moved to Cambridge to become the librarian of Harvard College.
The above would actually be referring to Charles Sanders Peirce's grandfather.
CSP's father graduated from Harvard in 1829 and at 24 was appointed the professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and in 1842 was made the first Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics. Benjamin Peirce was probably the first world-class in the sense internationally recognized mathematician the United States produced.
But did this make the Peirces Brahmins?
Mod
Questions to Consider and Discuss
How did you feel about Benjamin Peirce (Charles Sanders Perice's father? What is a confirmed intellectual elitist or pure meritocrat? What kind of teacher do you think he was and would you have wanted to have him as yours? What kind of father do you think he was?
This was an excerpt:
Peirce enjoyed the reputation, and even played up to it, because he was a confirmed intellectual elitist, a pure meritocrat with no democracy about him. "Do you follow me?" he is supposed to have asked one of his advanced classes during a lecture. No one did. "I'm not surprised," he said. "I know of only three persons who could."
Mod
Let us hear your thoughts.
message 41:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 09:51PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Questions to Consider and Discuss
"It was Peirce's view that mathematics was the supreme science, but a science accessible only to a few."
Do you agree or disagree - why or why not?
message 42:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 08, 2013 10:01PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
by Benjamin PeirceBenjamin Peirce, Linear Associative Algebra
Linear Associative Algebra, by Benjamin Peirce, LL.D, Perkins Professor of Math. and Astron. at Harvard University and Superindendent of the United States Coast Survey.
Read before the National Academy of Sciences, Washington City, 1870,
http://www.math.harvard.edu/history/p...
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2369153
http://archive.org/details/linearasso...
(Source - Harvard)
message 43:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 09, 2013 05:40PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
So just jump into the conversation - keep reading your few pages a day and posting your questions, your ideas, your comments, just anything that pops into your head and we will be here waiting for you and help you get through the selection with flying colors.
But the first thing you need to do is to read and post, post, post.
I agree with you 100% Bentley this is really a tough book to read and pull all the variables together. I have enjoyed it so far and look forward to seeing where all these ideas lead and what conclusion the author will draw. Many of the things that are discussed so far are still debatable even to this day. The ideas of evolution and creationism are still hot topics. Is there really a God or is what we have here now in this age all just an accumulation of past ideas and thoughts. Is there a master plan or are the atheist correct. How did these men believe one thing in the face of all the evidence that said they were wrong. How did this affect their judgement in their writings and daily life.
message 45:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 10, 2013 03:56PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Bentley wrote: "This is not the stuff they taught us in school - we got the cherry tree stories. "I got that American History in school too. :)
Mod
Well I finished reading this part . . . more background info . . . still waiting to find out where all of this is leading. I'm going to make a guess that eventually this is going to lead to an explanation of why the practice of slavery was able to continue for so long . . . and how one portion of society was able to denigrate and demean another portion using questionable facts and scientific theories. My soapbox remains by my side . . .
message 49:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Aug 12, 2013 07:57PM)
(new)
-
rated it 5 stars
Mod
Was there anything that you learned in this segment that you did not know before? Or was there anything that stood out for you in the reading?
Are there any of the questions above that you would like to tackle?
There are no right or wrong answers.
It is apparent from Menand that these folks did not believe that they were denigrating or demeaning anybody or that their facts were not facts or that their scientific theories were not the gospel truth and these were very bright men. That is one of the most shocking things: that a 7th or 8th grader would know the difference but that these learned men at that time did not.
Bentley . . .All of this (at least the people involved) are new to me . . . but the concepts are not . . . each person must gather information for themselves and evaluate the truth of it for themselves. Facts and figures are only a means by which we attempt to understand our existence . . . and frequently even they are not always correct.
My personal belief system has evolved over all the years I've been here and as a child always asked WHY? when I came upon something that I couldn't understand. When I have had to make a choice about some decision I had to make . . . my first instinct is to gather as much info as possible about it . . . and allow that to guide me . . . at the time that is the best I can do. Ten years from now the info may change and the decision I made may prove to not be the best one.
Life is the classroom . . . and experience is the teacher.
Every time we as humans try to understand or duplicate what has already been created . . . say AI . . . it just makes me appreciate what an amazing thing the human brain and body already is . . . whether God created it or it just evolved.
My personal preference is for God . . . and this vast schoolroom was provided just for us . . .
Okay, I'm off the soapbox now . . .
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age (other topics)Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon (other topics)
Linear Associative Algebra (other topics)
The Wings of the Dove (other topics)
The Portrait of a Lady (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Janet Wallach (other topics)Charles Slack (other topics)
Benjamin Peirce (other topics)
Henry James (other topics)
A. Hunter Dupree (other topics)
More...
For the week of August 5th - August 11th, we are reading Chapter Seven of The Metaphysical Club.
Our motto at The History Book Club is that it is never too late to begin a book. We are with you the entire way.
The seventh week's reading assignment is:
Week Seven - August 5th - August 11th
Part Three - Chapter Seven
The Peirces (151 - 176)
We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads as we did for other spotlighted books.
This book was kicked off on June 26th. We look forward to your participation. Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other noted on line booksellers do have copies of the book and shipment can be expedited. The book can also be obtained easily at your local library, or on your Kindle. Make sure to pre-order now if you haven't already. Please also patronage your local book stores.
There is no rush and we are thrilled to have you join us. It is never too late to get started and/or to post.
Bentley will be leading this discussion. Assisting Moderator Kathy will be the back up.
Welcome,
~Bentley
TO ALWAYS SEE ALL WEEKS' THREADS SELECT VIEW ALL
REMEMBER NO SPOILERS ON THE WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREADS - ON EACH WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREAD - WE ONLY DISCUSS THE PAGES ASSIGNED OR THE PAGES WHICH WERE COVERED IN PREVIOUS WEEKS. IF YOU GO AHEAD OR WANT TO ENGAGE IN MORE EXPANSIVE DISCUSSION - POST THOSE COMMENTS IN ONE OF THE SPOILER THREADS. THESE CHAPTERS HAVE A LOT OF INFORMATION SO WHEN IN DOUBT CHECK WITH THE CHAPTER OVERVIEW AND SUMMARY TO RECALL WHETHER YOUR COMMENTS ARE ASSIGNMENT SPECIFIC. EXAMPLES OF SPOILER THREADS ARE THE GLOSSARY, THE BIBLIOGRAPHY, THE INTRODUCTION AND THE BOOK AS A WHOLE THREADS.
Notes:
It is always a tremendous help when you quote specifically from the book itself and reference the chapter and page numbers when responding. The text itself helps folks know what you are referencing and makes things clear.
Citations:
If an author or book is mentioned other than the book and author being discussed, citations must be included according to our guidelines. Also, when citing other sources, please provide credit where credit is due and/or the link. There is no need to re-cite the author and the book we are discussing however.
If you need help - here is a thread called the Mechanics of the Board which will show you how:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2...
Glossary - SPOILER THREAD
Remember there is a glossary thread where ancillary information is placed by the moderator. This is also a thread where additional information can be placed by the group members regarding the subject matter being discussed.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Bibliography - SPOILER THREAD
There is a Bibliography where books cited in the text are posted with proper citations and reviews. We also post the books that the author used in his research or in his notes. Please also feel free to add to the Bibliography thread any related books, etc with proper citations. No self promotion, please. And please do not place long list of books on the discussion threads. Please add to the bibliography thread where we love to peruse all entries. Make sure you properly cite your additions to make it easier for all.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts - SPOILER THREAD
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
Table of Contents and Syllabus:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...