Description:
American natural history owes much to gifted amateurs who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, traveled widely, collected willy-nilly, and then, back at home, devoted years to sorting through their collections and cataloging their contents--an enterprise that introduced scientific rigor into what had been a kind of hobby. So writes literary scholar Christoph Irmscher, who, in exploring the aesthetic aspects of American natural history, considers the careers of several early naturalists, including Charles Willson Peale, John Bartram, John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz, and, in an unlikely turn, the showman P.T. Barnum, who turned a penchant for collecting oddments of nature into an itinerant freak show. All of these, Irmscher writes, delighted in "transforming relatively random assemblages of natural collectibles into works of art," works that would in many instances form the foundations for what are today important collections. Among the many pleasant surprises in Irmscher's narrative is an account of an 1865 trip organized by Agassiz to the Amazon River. One of the participants was the young William James, who would later become a famed psychologist and who wrote admiringly of Agassiz's relentless energy in pursuit of scientific specimens while admitting, "If there is anything I hate it is collecting." Irmscher's elegant book will be of interest to historians of 19th-century science, and to general readers with a fondness for the work of the brilliant, often eccentric, amateurs of the past. --Gregory McNamee
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