Ideas beyond Institutions

In the second and third chapters we have seen that in Europe the neo-Kantian tradition, known as organismic biology, spread through different, idiosyncratic ways in each country and was accepted by a number of investigators with very diverse backgrounds. However, in the United States the diffusion of such a tradition was less complex and more straightforward. Even though important figures such as Louis Agassiz had established an important European outpost of research and education on American soil since 1848 – in organizing, among other things, the important Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1860 at Harvard University, an institution shaped according to his bio-philosophy and pedagogic convictions and which, at that time, provided the training of some of the leading nineteenth-century American naturalists – the great syntheses in biology that are part of my story came later and, as I have already mentioned, from other sources. One of the most important intellectual sources was certainly Leuckart and his school at Leipzig. However, as we will see later on, although Leuckart and his school, as well as other European figures and institutions, inspired and shaped the biological knowledge of many American investigators, biologists in the new continent developed and translated what they had learned abroad. Since the very late nineteenth century, American biology – as K. R. Benson and J. Maienschein argue – had its own intellectual space and therefore its own peculiarities. In fact, the American organicist tradition I will sketch in this chapter and the next, like American biology in general, was not a mere copy of the European biology; it retained its own originality. Nevertheless, it shared styles, methods and key principles with continental investigators.