The Hard-Drinking 19th-Century Naturalists Who Aspired to Find and Classify Everything on Earth
At the Smithsonian, William Stimpson Created a New American Scientific Culture Around the Megatherium Club
In some respects, Washington, D.C., in the 1850s was an unlikely place to usher in a golden age of American natural history. Philadelphia and Boston had long been the traditional centers of American science, with the founding of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1812 and the Boston Society of Natural History in 1830. The nation’s capital was still viewed as a provincial Southern town. The Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846 after a bequest by British chemist and mineralogist James Smithson, was tasked with “the increase and …
