I spent the eighth week of my project in the Botany department, completing my notes and making sure that all citations were accurate before my internship period ended, because my direct access to the sources themselves would be ending at that time as well. Over the remainder of the summer, I worked part-time on finishing my project. This involved a rather time-consuming editing process. I reviewed my notes, added several new sections to my paper and expanded some of the existing sections, revised the paper, and created my bibliography and citations.

I originally intended to focus my paper on the contributions of the expedition to the biological (particularly botanical) collections at the Smithsonian. The collections are still the focus of my paper, but I expanded the topic slightly to include the contributions that the collections in turn made to science in the 1800s, such as the connection to Darwin and evolution made through Asa Gray’s 1859 memoir on the flora of Japan. I found these connections particularly interesting, because they showed how the U. S. North Pacific Exploring Expedition had significant impact not only in the rather narrow field of gathering specimens for collections, but also had broader effects on science, such as in the birth of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

These past three weeks have been a mix of research, compiling my notes, and drafting my final paper. I spent part of week 5 reading through my notes and organizing them into an outline of my final product, and I also wrote a short and very rough draft of my paper. This helped me organize my conception of the final product and also allowed me to identify weak points in my research (areas in which I needed to find more information in order to be able to present a comprehensive and coherent report). One of these points was the connection between the NPEE’s findings and the theory of evolution by natural selection. I encountered this exciting and interesting connection during my research into the NPEE’s scientific context, but I needed to dig deeper to really understand the full relationship and its implications. To this end, I took notes on the articles that Asa Gray published on the NPEE’s collections (there were only a few publications, but they represent the only results of the NPEE’s botanical findings that were ever published.) A memoir on the flora of Japan, published in 1859 (the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) was particularly interesting, since in it Gray directly referred to the theory of evolution by natural selection, which Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had very recently presented. I also read through some parts of Origin itself – I’ve never read any of it before, and I was somewhat surprised at how very detailed and comprehensive it is! Some of the “objections” against evolution, which are still used in popular media today (such as the supposed lack of intermediate fossils) were actually refuted by Darwin himself, 150 years ago!

During week 6, I took a trip up to the Gray Herbarium Archives at Harvard University to view the Charles Wright papers, which include his NPEE journal and his correspondence with Asa Gray. The journey was about eight hours of driving both ways, but the Gray Herbarium Archives is a very pleasant location, the librarian, archivist, and staff were very kind and helpful, and I enjoyed my visit immensely. Wright’s journal was fairly impersonal (which I believe was the standard style for expedition journals), but included information on his botanizing excursions along the trip. His letters to Gray, on the other hand, included many more personal details and opinions, and gave me information on Wright’s daily life. Wright clearly enjoyed his field of study – he would often stay up past midnight analyzing the specimens he collected during the day – but occasionally wrote complaints (peppered with colorful comments) about the struggles he encountered while attempting to fulfill his scientific duties.  For instance, naval officers showed little respect toward his and Stimpson’s scientific endeavors, and the flagship Vincennes, on which Wright and Stimpson were assigned, generally only stopped at well-known locations where Wright had little hope of finding new species.

During week 7, I finished taking some notes and started writing a true draft of my paper. On Tuesday, I found the website for a Cambridge University project called the Darwin Correspondence Project which, as the name suggests, is working on compiling and eventually publishing all of Charles Darwin’s correspondence. On the project site I found transcripts of the correspondence between Darwin and Gray, and I took notes on these during part of Tuesday and Wednesday. In these letters (which include a rather famous letter that outlines Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which he later used to claim priority for those ideas), the two discuss topics such as the difficulty in differentiating separate species versus varieties within a single species, and the geographical distribution of plants. The letters specifically mention Gray’s 1859 Memoir on the flora of Japan – in one letter, Darwin wrote:

“I must thank you for the extreme interest with which I have read it. It seems to me a most curious case of distribution & how very well you put the case from analogy on the high probability of single centres of creation.”

                                                      -Darwin to Gray, January 7, 1860

                                                       Darwin Correspondence Project 

The 1859 memoir discussed similarities between the flora of Japan and North America (based heavily on the botanical collections made by Wright on the NPEE), which had a surprisingly large number of species in common despite the great distance between the two. As Gray observed in the Memoir, this was a challenge to the generally accepted belief in the immutability of species, which generally ignored the presence of species in multiple, separate ranges, thinking that these instances were only rare exceptions to the rule that each species inhabited a single, well-defined area. Gray demonstrated that this phenomenon of a species inhabiting multiple, separate ranges was actually fairly common, and furthermore suggested that Darwin and Wallace’s new theory of common descent of species and evolution by natural selection was “[t]he only noteworthy attempt at a scientific solution of the problem”. In this way, the results of the NPEE supplied early evidence in support of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

I am currently working on the rough draft of my final paper. I have an outline of the structure of my paper, but I am not writing the paper straight through from beginning to end. Instead, I have been writing in sections by taking a topic from my outline and writing a few paragraphs on that topic, then organizing the sections into the order in which they will eventually appear in the final paper. After the rough sections are written, I will revise them and smooth out the transitions between the sections, which are currently rather choppy.

This is the last week of my internship here at the National Museum of Natural History. I will spend the time finishing the body of my paper and checking to make sure that all citations are correct. Hopefully, by the end of that time, I will no longer need to be on-site here in the Botany department, so any further polishing of my final product can be done from home.

During the past two weeks, I have continued my research into the NPEE and its surrounding context of science in the 1850s. The research has been very interesting, and I feel that the concept of my paper is beginning to take a more solid form, since I now have a better understanding of the significance of the NPEE’s contributions within the framework of the scientific mindset in the 1850s.

I spent the week of June 6^th reading and taking notes on the history of science, particularly science in the mid-1800s. One book, The Launching of Modern American Science 1846-1876 by Robert V. Bruce, was particularly helpful, since it focused on the time frame of the NPEE itself (1853-1856) as well as the years after the expedition, when the specimens and data collected on the expedition were being “worked up” (analyzed and classified) and prepared for publication. Most of the books I found were not focused as directly on this time period, but the general histories of science in the nineteenth century were nevertheless very useful in providing a broader history of science. In addition, the authors’ endnotes occasionally pointed me in the direction of potentially useful primary sources, such as the Smithsonian Institution Annual Reports and a few small publications of some of the NPEE’s botanical data.

In researching science in the 1850s, I found an exciting potential link between the NPEE and one of the most significant scientific developments of that time – the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, three years after the conclusion of the NPEE. According to the history of science books I researched, Darwin was a correspondent with Asa Gray, the American botanist who worked up the botanical collections of the NPEE, and because of this correspondence, Gray was aware of Darwin’s theories before they were published. Without going into too much detail, Gray’s observations on the striking similarity between certain North American plants and some of the Japanese plants brought back by the Expedition may have been an early piece of evidence in favor of Darwin’s theories on evolution! I will have to do a little more research on this intriguing possibility.

I spent Monday the 13^th finishing up my research on the History of Science, and then spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at the Smithsonian Archives, which is located a couple of blocks from the Natural History building, where I have been working. There, I read and took notes on a collection of letters, reports, and specimen lists related to the NPEE. One folder contained many interesting letters written by Asa Gray as he was working up the specimens after the expedition itself had been completed, in which he would occasionally remark upon the interesting qualities of the collection, or its usefulness to science.

Sometimes, when looking through the Archives collections, I ran across passages that are not very relevant to my topic of research, but nevertheless interesting from a historical or personal perspective. For instance, in his zoological notes, Alfred A. Ames, one of the naturalists on the NPEE for a time, wrote his observations on a large group of bioluminescent organisms in the ocean:

“Nothing can exceed the beauty of that scene. The animals below the surface gave out a […] diffused light in the midst of which the surface ones shone, like a precious jewel among lesser gems. The sea seemed on fire with them [and] so great was the light they shed that a book could be read when held over the stern, where the agitation of the water by the propeller caused them to give forth their brightest light. At a distance they looked like the rays of the moon upon the water.”

                                                                                -Smithsonian Archives, RU 7253, Box 1, Folder 1

This passage caught my attention because of its awestruck appreciation of the natural world – Ames was a scientist, but he also took note of the beauty of the organisms he was studying.

The working-up of the specimens extended into the late 1850s and early 1860s, during the buildup to the Civil War, so in the later piece of correspondence I occasionally found references to the growing tensions between the North and South (in fact, the advent of the Civil War is one of the reasons that most of the expedition reports were never published.) In a letter dated February 19, 1861, only a couple of weeks after the formation of the Confederacy, Asa Gray wrote from Cambridge, Massachusetts:

“We are breathing more freely here, and entertain hopes that we have seen the worst, and that with God’s blessing our country will survive the shock it has received, and recover. A firm, patient, and conciliatory spirit prevails in this region.

                                                                                -Smithsonian Archives, RU 7253, Box 1, Folder 3

The historical and political context of the NPEE may have influenced the extent of its scientific contributions as much as its scientific context in the 1850s. However, these tidbits of insight into the lives of the scientists also add personal interest to my project, and serve as reminders that the history of science is the study of the scientists as well as their scientific discoveries.

I am planning to take a short trip up to Boston during the week of June 27^th in order to view some papers of Charles Wright, the NPEE botanist, which are held at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University. These include Wright’s journal for the expedition, which could be extremely useful for my research, since I am focusing particularly on the botany aspect. Until then, I will work on compiling and organizing my notes to create an outline for my final paper. Of course, I don’t yet have all the information I hope to obtain, but I believe that I have enough to start creating my final product.