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Stephens's first task is to establish that the South had a bona fide scientific culture throughout the nineteenth century. To do so he must challenge the conventional historiography that dismisses the South's scientific accomplishments as either meager or amateurish on account of a regional romanticism more in keeping with medievalism than modernity. So intent is Stephens on retrieving southern science from the obscurity of the archive or the biases of scholarship that he goes so far as to claim that by mid-century only Philadelphia, Boston, and New York outstripped Charleston in excellence for research on natural history. Indeed a distinctive "circle" of scientific practitioners—comprising John Bachman, Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis Gibbes, Francis Holmes, and John McCrady—rotated around the Charleston museum of natural history. Convinced that nature disclosed the attributes of the Creator, members of this circle by and large restricted themselves to descriptive natural history rather than to pursuing experimental inquiries or mathematical applications.
With patience, precision, and not a little terminological fussiness, Stephens details the remarkable accomplishments of this suite of Charleston naturalists. Their collective contributions to the study of southern fish and fossils, mammals and minerals, birds and beasts of all kinds are painstakingly reviewed and their scientific niche in such natural history disciplines as ornithology and mammalogy, conchology and icthyology, meteorology and paleontology are specified with ecological exactitude. Along the way, Stephens pauses to sketch in their associations with the leading European and American naturalists of their day—Lyell, von Humboldt, Agassiz; their election to foreign and domestic scientific societies; and from time to time their colorful individualisms. The fertile, if stormy, relationship John Bachman sustained with the great illustrator, J.J. Audubon and his son Victor, for example, is reviewed with telling detail, while the anthropomorphic vocabulary of Holbrook's reptile descriptions does not escape Stephens's eye for detail.
When we stand back from the detail of this audit, a distinctive style of southern science begins to come into focus. Primarily, science southern-style gravitated around matters of natural history rather than experimental philosophy, and remained accessible to the needs of the plantation, the surgery, the market, and the pulpit. Conceptually it was characterized by what might be called an acquisitive Baconianism in which collections took precedence over conjecture, specimens over speculation. Indeed, as Stephens makes plain, Baconian philosophy displayed such a distinctive geographical distribution that even when it "had lost its hold upon the minds of all northern scientists, it continued to carry considerable weight in the mind of the southern scientist." Not surprisingly, the prevailing intellectual context within which natural history was prosecuted was that derived from natural theology. Again and again, even when they flirted with such heresies as the idea of a pre-adamite humanity, southern scientists located their mollusks and their hydrozoans in the framework of divine providence. The intricacies of the natural order attested to the beneficence of the Grand Architect who fitted organisms to their environments. But perhaps most conspicuous, was the tendency of southern scientists to use their research as the vehicle for displaying local fealty. Every member of the Charleston scientific coterie was devoted to southern culture, and committed to promoting their region's identity through scholarly research and the construction of scientific institutions.
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