JEFFERSON’S SHADOW: THE STORY OF HIS SCIENCE

Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science. By Keith Thomson. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. [xiv], 321. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-300-18403-7.) Thomas Jefferson continues to fascinate. Books and articles continually emerge from various presses and journals. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson project, begun over sixty years ago, continues to thrive, providing scholars with a rich mine of primary material. Yet as Keith Thomson reminds us, only a small portion of this research has been devoted to Jefferson’s interests in science. Thomson is the author of two books relating to Jefferson’s interest in natural history, The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America (New Haven, 2008) and A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (Chapel Hill, 2008), the latter meant for a more popular audience.

As the onetime president and CEO of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (now of Drexel University), which contains Jefferson’s collection of fossils, and as an executive officer at the American Philosophical Society, which houses the records of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Thomson has ample credentials for a work on this topic. In Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science, Thomson has extended his reach to include Jefferson’s broader scientific endeavors and relates them to what the author calls Jefferson’s “vision of the young nation and its future” (p. 5). Jefferson’s Shadow is divided into six parts: “The Young Jefferson,” “Natural Science,” “They, the People,” “Useful Knowledge,” “The National Stage,” and “Philosophical Issues.”

Chapter 1 is a teaser centered on the moose antlers and other material evidence Jefferson used to challenge Europe’s leading natural historian, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and his secondhand speculations concerning America and its natural history. This critique was later extended in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Much of Part 1 is familiar ground (Jefferson’s libraries, schooling, and so on) but essential for understanding Jefferson’s rationalism and his interactions with science. Part 2 takes us to the mastodon–Jefferson’s first great venture into natural history–and then into the natural history sections of the Notes. Thomson regards Jefferson’s writings here as one of the best discussions of American animals and plants available at the time. Jefferson’s interests were thoroughly empirical, however; he mistrusted geology, which he found too speculative. Here Thomson points out that Jefferson’s thought was constrained by his lingering belief in a version of the biblical theory of creation and also by his disbelief in the extinction of species, though he was an avid collector of fossils.