A democracy of facts, an empire of reason: Swallow submersion and natural history in the early American Republic

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 62, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 663-696

  Lewis, Andrew J ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

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EID: 60949822166     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491444     Document Type: Review

References (138)

1. Samuel Dexter, "A Letter on the Retreat of House-Swallows in Winter, from the Honourable Samuel Dexter, Esq.; to the Honourable James Bowdoin, Esq.;Pres. A.A., " Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1(Boston, 1785): 494-96,
2. repr. at least twice, see American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, &c., Prose and Poetical 2 (1787): 357-59,
3. Massachusetts Magazine; or, Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment 3 (1791): 621.
4. For biographical information on Samuel Dexter, see John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York, 1999), 6: 535-36.
5. Dexter, "Retreat of House-Swallows in Winter, " 495.
6. Olaus Magnus, Histoire des pays septentrionaus (Paris, 1561);
7. Pierre Belon du Mans, L'Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, avec leursdescriptions, & naifs portraicts retirez du naturel (Paris, 1555);
8. Francis Willughby and John Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby(London, 1678);
9. Mark Catesby, "Of Birds of Passage, " Philosophical Transactionsof the Royal Society of London 44 (1747); 435-44.
10. For a brief history of the controversy over swallow migration, see Jean Dorst, The Migration of Birds (Boston, 1962), chap. 1.
11. For a discussion of Catesby's understandings of avian migration, see Joyce E. Chaplin, "Mark Catesby, A Skeptical Newtonian in America, " in Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 60-64.
12. Anonymous, "On the Submersion of Swallows, " Medical Repository3 (1800): 241-46
13. Charles Caldwell, Medical and Physical Memoirs, Containing, among Other Subjects, a Particular Enquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Late Pestilential Epidemics of the United States (Philadelphia, 1801).
14. Most swallow testimonies of this period reported the birds eithersubmerging or emerging from the mud of lakes and ponds of migrating. A thirdalternative was that the birds hibernated in hollow trees or caves. Hibernationtestimonies, less frequent than those concerning submersion or migration, areincluded in this article because, though varying slightly with submersionstories, they share common traits of reportage, argument, and conclusions withsubmersion testimonies. The controversy over swallow migration and submersionhas largely escaped the notice of historians. Those who have studied the debateconsider it either a vestigal remnant of early modern folk knowledge or theby-product of nature observation by the unscientific and credulous. As a resultthese studies push swallow submersion to the margins of natural historypractice, making it the fantastic result of a prescientific era (see Elsa Guerdrum Allen, "The History of American Ornithology before Audubon, "Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 41, no. 3 [1951]: 387-591).
15. William Eagle Clarke argues that "nothing more remarkable can befound in the romance of natural history" than the belief in swallowsubmersion; its adherents "led mankind astray for many generations"(Clarke, Studies in Bird Migration [London 1912], 13).
16. See also Frederick C. Lincoln, The Migration of American Birds (New York1939);
17. Jean Dorst, The Migrations of Birds, trans. Constance D. Sherman (Boston, 1962);
18. Kevin R. McNamara, "The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47, no. 2(April 199): 210-34.
19. This article is situated at the intersection of literatures on scientificepistemology and the cultural history of scientific ideas and practice. Onnatural historical and scientific epistemology, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life(Princeton, N.J., 1985);
20. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1994);
21. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 2001).
22. For examples of how natural historical literature can shape culture andcultural expectation, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonderof the New World (Chicago, 1991);
23. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation(London, 1992).
24. On the prophets of glory, see Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), chap. 7.
25. On the importance of probability in natural historical matters, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideasabout Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 1975), 146;
26. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1983);
27. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 56-57.
28. On the eighteenth-century European embrace of philosophical modesty, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969), 2: 138-39;
29. Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago 1975), 87-95.
30. For a perspective on modesty in early modern science, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England(Chicago, 1994), chap. 4;
31. Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), chap. 3.
32. The literature on the shock of discovery and its lasting effects isvoluminous. Helpful examples include Anthony Grafton et al., New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
33. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature andthe Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)
34. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Natural Curiosity: Curious Nature in Early America, " Common-Place 4, no. 2 (January 2004), http:/www.common-place. org/vol-04/no-02/kupperman/.
35. "Democracy of facts" is from Benjamin Smith Barton, A Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty Which Has Been Ascribed to the Rattle-Snake, and Other American Serpents (Philadelphia, 1796), 50.
36. The phrase "empire of reason" comes from Joel Barlow, AnOration, Delivered at the North Church in Hartford, at the Meeting of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati ... (Hartford, Conn., 1787), 19.
37. For an exploration of the politics of commonsense observation in Atlanticworld science, see James Delbourgo, "Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment: The Transatlantic Career of Perkins's Tractors, " WMQ 61, no. 4 (October 2004): 643-84.
38. On the tensions within the American naturalist community over theparameters of its practice, see Joyce Elizabeth Chaplin, "Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context, " in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730-1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia, 2003), 76-96.
39. A mid-eighteenth-century series of published letters and reports aboutswallow migration and submersion between English natural historian Peter Collinson and Daines Barrington, vice president of the Royal Society of London, shows that the dispute was not solely American. Collinson argued vehemently formigration, whereas Barrington sided with those who believed the birdshibernated. Though Collinson and Barrington disagreed about the wintering habitsand whereabouts of swallows, they concurred on how to settle natural historydisputes. Both men sought natural history information and testimony fromindividuals around the world, seeking facts that would allow them to determinethe legitimacy of various natural phenomena (Peter Collinson, "A Letter tothe Honourable J. Th. Klein, Secretary to the City of Dantzick, from Mr. Peter Collinson, F.R.S. concerning the Migration of Swallows, " Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 51 [1759-60]: 459-64).
40. Thomas Pennant, a Scottish natural historian, agreed with Collinson, writing that submersion is "too amazing and unnatural to merit attention, if it was not that some of the learned have been credulous enough to deliver, for fact, what has the strongest appearance of impossibility; we mean therelation of swallows passing the winter immersed under ice, at the bottom oflakes, or lodged beneath the water of the sea at the foot of rocks." Thoughearnestly delivered these stories "must provoke a smile" (Thomas Pennant, British Zoology [London, 1768], 2: 248-53).
41. See also "Remarks on Swallows on the Rhine: In a Letter from Mr.Archard, in Privy-Garden, to Mr. Peter Collinson, F.R.S., " Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 53 (1763): 101-2;
42. Daines Barrington, "An Essay on the periodical Appearing and Disappearing of certain Birds, at different Times of the Year. In a Letter fromthe Honourable Daines Barrington, Vice-Pres. R.S. to William Watson, M.D.F.R.S., " Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 62(1772): 265-326.
43. For a consideration of the legal foundations for natural history factdiscourse, see Rose-Mary Sargent, The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (Chicago, 1995), chaps. 2-3;
44. Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), chaps. 5-6.
45. Shapin, Social History of Truth;
46. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society [Chicago, 1998]).
47. Historians of the colonial period are uncovering the many ways in whichcolonists thought about and participated in natural history. Notable piecesinclude Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb, Ill., 1992);
48. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York, 1996);
49. Susan Scott Parrish, "The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World, " WMQ 54, no. 3 (July 1997): 475-514;
50. Susan Scott Parrish, "Performances of Curiosity: British and British-American Natural Histories of the New World in the Colonial Period"(Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998);
51. Sara Stidstone Gronim, "Ambiguous Empire: The Knowledge of the Natural World in British Colonial New York" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1999);
52. Kay Dian Kriz, "Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane's 'Natural History of Jamaica, '" WMQ 57, no. 1 (January 2000):35-78;
53. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science onthe Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
54. Prince, Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge.
55. Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America(Urbana, Ill., 1970).
56. David Ramsay, An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence:Spoken before a Publick Assembly of the Inhabitants of Charleston in South-Carolina ... (Charleston, S.C., 1778), 2,
57. repr. in the first issue of United States Magazine; A Repository of History, Politics, and Literature 1 (January 1779): 22-25.
58. Barlow, Oration, 19.
59. Writing about science and the United States often positioned the nationas the location in which the long process of enlightenment from ancient Greeceand Egypt to the present would culminate (see [Samuel Dexter], The Progress of Science. A Poem Delivered at Harvard College before a Committee of Overseers ...[(Boston), 1780];
60. Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached before his Excellency John Hancock, Esq;Governour, The Honourable the Senate, and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ... [Boston, (1780)];
61. Owen Biddle, An Oration, Delivered the Second of March, 1781, at the Request of the American Philosophical Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge ...[Philadelphia, 1781];
62. John Gardiner, An Oration Delivered July 4, 1785, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston ... [Boston, (1785)]).
63. Ramsay, Oration on American Independence, 5-6.
64. A discussion of the relationship between science and agriculture can befound in Timothy Matlack, An Oration, Delivered March 16, 1780,
65. Before the Patron, Vice-Presidents and Members of the American Philosophical Society ... (Philadelphia, 1780).
66. For a more thorough treatment of the patriotic rhetoric surroundingscience in the early Republic, see Hindle, Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, chap. 7;
67. John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames, Iowa, 1984), chap. 1;
68. Christopher Looby, "The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politicsin Jefferson, Peale, and Bartram, " Early American Literature 22, no. 3(Fall 1987): 252-73;
69. I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison (New York, 1995).
70. Charles Willson Peale stressed the utility of natural history in Charles W. Peale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Natural History ...(Philadelphia, 1800), [10], 11-12.
71. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire. Comprehending the Events ofone Complete Century from the Discovery of the River Pascataqua ... (Boston, 1792), 3: 228-29.
72. Biddle, Oration, Delivered the Second of March, 6;
73. Cooper, Sermon Preached before John Hancock, 4;
74. Gardiner, Oration delivered July 4, 1785.
75. For an exhaustive treatment of the origins and repercussions of the Buffonian controversy in European intellectual history, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1973);
76. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Palo Alto, Calif., 2001).
77. See also Gilbert Chinard, "Eighteenth Century Theories on America as Human Habitat, " Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91, no.1 (1947): 27-57;
78. Greene, Science in the Age of Jefferson, chap. 1;
79. Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812-1842 (University, Ala., 1986), chap. 1;
80. Richard White, "Discovering Nature in North America, " Journalof American History 79, no. 3 (December 1992): 874-91;
81. Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998).
82. Thomas Jefferson famously refuted Bolton in Jefferson, Notes on the Stateof Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), 47.
83. See Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997);
84. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 44 vols. (Paris, 1749-88).
85. The English translation most often cited during the early Republic is Buffon, Buffon's Natural History. Containing a theory of the earth ... (London, 1797).
86. Belknap, History of New-Hampshire, 3: 228-29;
87. Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont (Walpole, N.H., 1794), v;
88. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 54;
89. James Mease, A Geological Account of the United States ... (Philadelphia, 1807), 84.
90. Benjamin Smith Barton, "Lecture on Natural Knowledge, " Barton Papers, Miscellaneous Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia;
91. For a discussion of implications of the Baconian reforms, see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, chap. 6;
92. Paula Findlen, "Courting Nature, " in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, 1996), 57-74.
93. On Bacon's antipathy toward popular natural history, see Findlen, "Disciplining the Disciple: Francis Bacon and the Reform of Natural Historyin the Seventeenth Century, " in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley(Rochester, N.Y., 1997), 239-60.
94. Francis Hopkinson, "An Address to the American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia, for promoting useful knowledge: Delivered January16, 1784, " in The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia, 1792), 364-66.
95. Hopkinson, "Address to the American Philosophical Society, "366;
96. Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America, trans. John Reinhold Forster(1770-71; repr., Barre, Mass., 1972), 1: ix.
97. The literature on revolutionary-era print culture is vast and expanding.This article has drawn on Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York, 1989);
98. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
99. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994);
100. Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discoursein Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
101. Swallow submersion testimonies share characteristics with reports ofmarvels and wonders. See Shapiro, Culture of Fact, chaps. 3-4.
102. For an extended examination of early modern understanding of marvels, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800(Cambridge, 1990);
103. Findlen, Possessing Nature;
104. For an examination of wonders and curiosities in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, see Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999). The conversion narrative ofswallow submersion unbelievers to that of belief in its reality must haveresonated with a reading public already familiar with religious conversionnarratives. Unfortunately, space constraints preclude a thorough examination ofthe relationship between conversion narratives and natural history practice.
105. Josiah Blakeley, "On the Retreat of Swallows, " American Museum3 (May 1788): 451-52.
106. For accounts similar to Blakeley, see Severyn J. Bruyn, "A Letter onthe Retreat of Swallows, and the Torpid State of certain Animals, in Winter, " Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2, no. 1(1793): 96-99;
107. Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 115-18.
108. Blakeley, American Museum 3: 451.
109. [Josiah Blakeley], "Facts and Remarks Respecting Swallows, "American Magazine 1 (July 1788): 586.
110. Peter Cole, "On the Disappearance of Swallows in Autumn; in a Letterfrom Mr. Peter Cole, to Dr. Mitchell, dated New-York, September 25, 1798, "Medical Repository 2 (1798): 178-80.
111. H. Pollock, "On the Submersion of Swallows, " Monthly Magazine, and American Review 3 (1800): 36-37,
112. repr. in Medical Repository 4, no. 2 (1800): 215-16,
113. Literary Tablet 1, no. 5 (1803): 19.
114. Anonymous, "On the Submersion of Swallows, " Medical Repository3, no. 3 (1800): 241-46.
115. Paul F. S. Cornelius, "Benjamin White (1725-1794), His Older Brother Gilbert, and Notes on the Hibernation of Swallows, " Archives of Natural History 21, no. 2 (1994): 231-36.
116. Charles Caldwell, "On the Winter Retreat of Swallows, " in Medical and Physical Memoirs, containing, Among Other Subjects, A Particular Enquiry into the Origin and Nature of the Late Pestilential Epidemics of the United States (Philadelphia, 1801), 243-44, 248.
117. For Caldwell's interpretation of Barton and the swallow submersioncontroversy, see his autobiography, Caldwell, Autobiography of Charles Caldwell, M.D. (1855; repr., New York, 1968), 168-69.
118. Caldwell, "On the Winter Retreat of Swallows, " 261-63.
119. [Anonymous], "Review of Caldwell's Medical and Physical Memoirs, " American Review, and Literary Journal 1, no. 2 (April-June 1801):178-79.
120. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, "Remarks on the Prints of Human Feet, Observed in the Secondary Limestone of the Mississippi Valley, " American Journal of Science and Arts 5, no. 2 (1822): 223-31;
121. John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, Up to the First Settlements Therein by the White People in the Year 1768 (Nashville, Tenn., 1823), 55;
122. William A. Thompson, "On the Vitality of Toads, &c. Enclosed in Firm Materials, " American Journal of Science and Arts 25, no. 1 (1834):41-47.
123. For a history of enclosed toads, see Bondeson, Feejee Mermaid, 280-308.
124. Toads enclosed in rocks are mentioned in Anonymous, American Review, and Literary Journal 1: 178-79.
125. [Anonymous], Review of Medical and Physical Memoirs, " Medical Repository 5 (1802): 327-28.
126. For a similar case where facts are pitted against theory, see Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, chap 5, esp. 180-84.
127. Barton, Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty, 7-9, 11, 49.
128. For a treatment of the historical roots of the fascinating faculty, see Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 354-55, 580-81;
129. Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1976), chap. 5.
130. Barton, Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty, 9, 35, 49-53, 61-65.
131. For the persistence of the myth of charming by snakes, see Leventhal, Inthe Shadow of the Enlightenment, 138;
132. Lloyd N. Jeffrey, "Snake Yarns of the West and Southwest, "Western Folklore 14 (October 1955): 251.
133. Benjamin Smith Barton, Supplement to a Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty Which Has Been Ascribed to the Rattle-Snake ... (Philadelphia, 1800), 35-36.
134. Barton's Memoir was translated into German and was challenged in 1798 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose Handbuch der Naturgeschischte (1779) Bartonattacked.
135. Blumenbach's reply ("The fascinating Power of the Rattle-Snake, withsome Remarks on Dr. Barton's Memoir on that Subject, " Philosophical Magazine [1798]: 251-55) prompted the Supplement.
136. W. L. McAtee details numerous anecdotal reports of torpidity in swallowsthrough the modern era (W. L. McAtee "Torpidity in Birds, " American Midland Naturalist 38, no. 1 [July 1947]: 191-206).
137. Steven L. Lima raises the possibility that some non-water-escapingspecies may plunge into water to avoid capture by predators; however, Lima notesthat "such species appear doomed under these circumstances" (Steven L. Lima, "Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on Escape from Predatory Attack: A Survey of North American Birds, " Wilson Bulletin 105, no. 1[March 1993]: 1-47).
138. Many swallow species frequent riparian habitats and are agile fliers whosometimes skim the surfaces of lakes and rivers, capturing insects on the wingor drinking water; swallows are also known to splash momentarily in the water tobathe. Bank swallows excavate tunnels for nests along steep riverbanks, whereasbarn, cave, and cliff swallows use mud to construct their own nest sites inspring (Chris Elphick, John B. Dunning Jr., and David Allen Sibley, eds., The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior [New York, 2001], 419-24). It may be thatwitnesses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mistook typicalor extraordinary behavior of swallows as evidence of swallow submersion.