SOURCE: Silver, Bruce. “William Bartram's and Other Eighteenth-Century Accounts of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 4 (1978): 597-614.

[In the following essay, Silver argues that critics have overlooked the contribution of Bartram to the naturalist literary tradition. Also investigated is how the Travels characterize the natural world.]

Despite the intellectual productivity of our Bicentennial year, too little was said about colonial Americans whose contributions to our culture were not tied to the decision and struggle for independence. William Bartram (1739-1823), the apolitical son of the Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777), is among those who have been neglected.¹ Bartram's significance as a naturalist and amateur scientist is a matter of record.² He learned about plants from his father and from working with him in their garden on the banks of the Schuylkill river. The combination of William Bartram's botanical knowledge, his talents as an artist - naturalist, and the influence of his name among European horticulturists enabled him to travel throughout the southeastern American wilderness under the patronage of Dr. John Fothergill, the wealthy English gardener and botanist.³ Bartram set out to collect plants and seeds in April 1773 and did not return to Philadelphia until January 1778, after he had explored substantial portions of the Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana.⁴

Bartram published the record of his five years of wandering as the Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida … (1791). His book—probably the “first genuine and artistic interpretation of the American landscape”—influenced the romantic poets of England and France, presented a lucid and compassionate account of the Cherokees and other Indians of the Southeast,⁵ secured his own election into the American Philosophical Society,⁶ and induced Thomas Jefferson to ask that Bartram accompany an expedition into the newly acquired Louisiana territory.⁷

My concern is not with Bartram's place in history, art or literature, nor with the details and examples of his contributions to our strictly scientific knowledge. I am rather impressed by Bartram's Travels as a blend of careful observation and moral prepossessions about the goodness of nature, a blend so complete that a description of American plant and animal life becomes a celebration of nature's design and worth. Bartram's world, as the product of a benevolent God, is full of value and goodness.⁸ His descriptions of nature are equivalent to scientific descriptions suffused with aesthetic, utilitarian, and religious values which do not affect his objectivity. The notion that a description should be neutral, i.e., that facts and values ought to be distinguished and separated for purposes of scientific inquiry, never occurred to him. In this respect Bartram is one with the Jeffersonians whom Daniel Boorstin discusses in The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson:

By admiring the universe as the complete and perfected work of divine artifice …, the Jeffersonian was insisting that the values by which the universe was to be assessed were somehow implicit in nature. All facts were endowed with an ambiguous quality: they became normative as well as descriptive.⁹

In an important sense, however, Bartram was different from the Jeffersonian virtuosi and from the natural theologians of his day. Unlike the former, he did not allow his convictions to dominate or to cloud what he observed.¹⁰ He was traveling through the American wilderness to discover and to collect its products. He was not out to confirm a theory about the goodness of the universe. Unlike the typical natural theologians of the eighteenth century, Bartram was not arguing from nature's goodness to God's. As a consequence, he neither narrowed his view to include only those phenomena and organisms that seemed most easily to point to God's benevolence nor did he involve himself in unconvincing vindications of God's beneficence where the harsh efficiency of nature sometimes called it into question.

Bartram believed passionately that nature was good, and he believed that much of what he found in his travels mirrored the power and goodness of its architect. But he was also a tough-minded naturalist whose mission was one of science and discovery. He was not interested in gathering evidence for a belief that, in his own estimation, needed no argument. Instead, he described what he saw with a scope and objectivity unequalled by others who traveled and wrote about the frontiers of eighteenth-century America.

I. Nature and Design—The prominence of the design argument for the existence and goodness of God is a commonplace in the history of speculative thought. That the existence of a benevolent deity could be established by appealing to order and contrivance in nature was a conviction shared by Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, William Paley, and many others.¹¹ Philosophers, naturalists, and scientists of the Enlightenment looked to the variety of plant and animal life, to the adaptation of organisms to their environments, and to the structure and mechanics of organs like the heart or the eye. All of this was seen as incontrovertible evidence for the existence, providence, and skill of a creator.

Philosophically, the argument from design, after Spinoza's critique of it (Ethics, Appendix to Part I), suffered its deathblow with the publication of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779).¹² Developments in nineteenth-century science were no friend to this argument either. Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) could account for all instances of apparent design and purposeful contrivance in nature in terms of the purely mechanical ingredients of natural selection.¹³ There was no reason to appeal to any transcendent and unverifiable theological hypothesis.

Bartram's book appeared nearly seventy years before Darwin's, and there is no evidence that the Travels was influenced by the proto-evolutionary theories of the European Enlightenment.¹⁴ If Bartram read any Hume, it was the History of England (1763) and not the unsettling Dialogues, a work published only a year after Bartram's return to Philadelphia.¹⁵ Immune to or unaware of these new currents in science and philosophy, Bartram wrote lyrically of nature as God's great product:

We admire the mechanism of a watch and the fabric of a piece of brocade as being the production of art; these merit our admiration, and must excite our esteem for the ingenious artist or modifier; but nature is the work of God omnipotent.¹⁶

Wherever we look we are likely to be struck by the beauty and variety of what God has made:

This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexplicably beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures.¹⁷

Even among living things that cannot be praised for their beauty, e.g., plants and trees that fall short of the splendid “pompous Palms of Florida,” the “glorious Magnolia,” or the “umbrageous Live Oak,” the traces of God's skill and workmanship are patent. Species lacking aesthetic quality inevitably possess something of equal or greater value. Bartram mentions as examples the medicinal properties of thyme and the nutritive importance of Oryza sativa (rice) or Pyrus augustifolia (crab apple).¹⁸ Thus utility, not less than beauty, reminds us of the wisdom of the author of nature:

Though none of these most useful tribes are conspicuous for stateliness, figure, or splendour, yet their valuable qualities and virtues excite love, gratitude, and adoration to the great Creator, who was pleased to endow them with such eminent qualities, and reveal them to us for our sustenance, amusement, and delight.¹⁹

Taken together, the beauty, usefulness, and variety of nature are marks or vestiges that point to the wisdom and providence of their transcendent cause. Bartram sees the natural order—even as Saint Francis and others in the Middle Ages had seen it—as a speculum Dei in which plants and animal life show us how “the great Author has impartially distributed his favours to his creatures, so that the attributes of each one seem to be of sufficient importance to manifest the divine and inimitable workmanship.”²⁰

The study of nature has clear intrinsic, instrumental, and didactic value for Bartram. Its intrinsic value, i.e., what satisfies disinterested inquiry, was of undeniable importance to him. He kept accurate and extensive records of the migration of various birds despite the fact that many considered such a study productive of nothing that had any practical application.²¹

There is no question that Bartram believed that the investigations of a naturalist are instrumentally valuable. He was persuaded, as were others involved in the work of the American Philosophical Society, that expanding our knowledge of the world helps to increase the happiness and comfort of mankind.²² His own travels and observations satisfied his desire to know, expressed his veneration for God and his creation, and worked to the benefit of society:

I, continually impelled by a restless spirit of curiosity, in pursuit of new productions of nature, my chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty, and perfection of the great Almighty Creator, and in the contemplation, that through divine aid and permission, I might be instrumental in discovering, and introducing into my native country, some original productions of nature, which might become useful to society.²³

The didactic value of natural history for Bartram arises from the discovery of nature's order and richness, together with the awareness that these are impressed upon it by God. The steadiness and regularity that characterize and account for the balance of the living world should serve as a model for our own conduct:²⁴

Let us rely on Providence, and by studying and contemplating the works and power of the Creator, learn wisdom and understanding in the economy of nature, and be seriously attentive to the divine monitor within.²⁵

Even being caught in a severe storm near the banks of Georgia's Alatamaha river is instructive for Bartram. A generally peaceful river, swollen by a severe storm, once again becomes placid as the wind and rain abate. Despite occasional storms and other disturbances, calm and balance in nature are always restored. From this one can learn, according to Bartram, that balance and temperance can be restored to our own behavior following those instances in which it is excessive, immoderate, and clouded.²⁶

It is true, of course, that much of what Bartram says about the instructive value of nature, design, and the clockwork of the created order is conventional for the age in which he wrote. Robert Boyle and Leibniz are two among many in the seventeenth century who had stressed the analogy between creation and the intricate mechanism of a watch or clock. The most familiar statement of this analogy, after the publication of Bartram's Travels, was that of William Paley in his influential Natural Theology (1802).²⁷

Others, e.g., George Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, and the English poet Thomas Traherne, had written before Bartram of nature as a kind of theophany which points beyond itself to its wise creator. This is clearly the notion Paley had in mind when he suggested that the principal reason for attending to the beauty, variety, and splendid adjustment of the living world is that we come to know and to appreciate its spiritual underpinnings for the first time. Nature becomes a

temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration … Whereas formerly God was seldom in our thoughts, we can now scarcely look upon anything without perceiving its relation to him. Every organized natural body, in the provisions which it contains for its sustentation and propagation, testifies a care, on the part of the Creator, expressly directed to these purposes.²⁸

The belief that nature is a guide or teacher is also a theme that precedes Bartram. Thomas More's Utopians insisted that virtuous conduct is the consequence of following nature and that improper conduct is the result of deviating from it. Joseph Butler made the same point in his Fifteen Sermons (1726) as did Rousseau in the Origins of Inequality among Men (1755).²⁹

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bartram's Travels (1791) should have themes and elements in common with important contemporaneous works in philosophy, morals, and natural religion; neither is it a revelation to find that a work written during the period of the American Enlightenment was touched by the thought of the European Enlightenment. It would have been more remarkable if the content of his book bore no resemblance to the science, theology, and literature of the period in which it was written.

More interesting than these similarities, however, is the extent to which the Travels is different from the general scientific and theoretical tradition of which it is, nonetheless, a part. Bartram did more than repeat the claims and propositions already familiar to a literate eighteenth-century audience. There are features that make the Travels unique and important among theologically oriented natural histories, and a few of these are worth examining.

II. Design without Argument in the Travels.—Besides the regional character of its scientific material, it is the absence of a deliberate argument for the existence and goodness of God that helps to distinguish Bartram's Travels from the mixtures of natural history and theology common to the Enlightenment.³⁰ Strictly speaking, Bartram is not arguing at all. He writes as a moralist and as a naturalist who sees the American wilderness as the product of a benevolent creator.³¹ The goodness of God is axiomatic; and the goodness, beauty, and utility of creation are apparent to all who will look around them.³²

Freed from any need to argue from the goodness of nature to the existence of God as its beneficent cause, Bartram could devote his energies to the real business of the Travels, i.e., natural science. As a scientist, he was concerned to describe and to classify a part of the animate world. Bartram's insistence that this world, insofar as it was fashioned by a benevolent maker, is a realm of values as well as facts does not interfere with his role and responsibilities as an objective scientist. Indeed, his antecedent belief in God's goodness and the inherent value of nature made it unnecessary for him to burden the Travels with theological proofs which might reduce or dilute the scientific content of his work. Bartram gives us penetrating descriptions of plant and animal life in the wilderness, not unpersuasive arguments for God's benevolence or a priori principles of cosmic harmony intended to explain away apparent evil or maladjustment in nature.³³

By contrast, Paley's Natural Theology is one among many works that employ the kind of arguments Bartram was able to avoid. Paley argues, for example, that the happiness of beasts is itself a proof that the world is the product of wise and beneficent design.³⁴ He describes the greedy joy of aphids as they rob plants of their vital juices. He writes enthusiastically about clouds of young shrimp.

in the act of bounding into the air from the shallow margin of the water or from wet sand. If any motion of a mute animal could express delight, it was this. … Suppose, then, what I have no doubt of, each individual of this number be in a state of positive enjoyment; what a sum, collectively, of gratification and pleasure have we here before our view!³⁵

A trained naturalist would have darker, well-founded suspicions about Paley's account. Far from regarding the leaping of shrimp as evidence that God is interested in sustaining the uninterrupted happiness of all his creatures, he would see it for what it is, i.e., their frantic effort to escape the fish that constantly prey upon them.

Bartram says very little about shrimp, but his description of bounding fish helps to illustrate the difference between his own careful science and Paley's casual hedonism. To be sure, Bartram is given over to personification when he writes about the marine life of lakes and sink-holes in northeastern Florida. Schools of fish, “after encountering various obstacles, and beholding new and unthought-of scenes of pleasure and disgust, after many days absence from the surface of the world, emerge again from the dreary vaults, and appear exulting in gladness, and sporting in the transparent waters of some far distant lake.”³⁶

It may seem at first that Bartram and Paley are saying about the same thing and that each is guilty of unscientific excess, but this is not the case. Paley is persuaded that the shrimp are truly delighted and that their happiness proves the pervasiveness of God's goodness. He is silent about the animals which feed upon them. He has either missed or suppressed a fact critical to a complete and accurate scientific account of the jumping of shrimp.

On the other hand, Bartram's fish merely “appear exulting in gladness.” His description is not intended to prove God's providence and goodness. His report begins with poetic imagery, but poetry quickly yields to an exhaustive list of the outward characteristics of these fish and to a statement of their fate. The spotted garr, “accoutred in an impenetrable coat of mail,” is cannibalistic. The mud fish is large, thick, and round; and the yellow beam is actually multicolored.³⁷ All of them fall victim to the great soft-shelled tortoise.³⁸ Their happiness is merely apparent. This is a fact, and there is neither joy nor delight in it.

Even in a rich and romantic word-picture of a small spring-fed lake a few miles from Florida's Lake George, Bartram suggests but then resists the opportunity to speculate about nature in the language of theology and morals. The water of this basin is so clear and so full of life that it looks to him “at first but as a piece of excellent painting.” The scene is quite real, but we are warned against jumping to erroneous conclusions about the moral harmony of this microcosm. Among the assorted fish and crocodiles Bartram finds in this spring, there seems to be “no sign of enmity, no attempt to devour each other; the different bands seem peaceably and complaisantly to move a little aside, as if it were to make room for others to pass.”³⁹ How are we to explain this atypical and seemingly benevolent community of predators?

Paley might have insisted, as he had with the shrimp, that such happiness and tranquility are the basis for arguing that divine benevolence extends to every living creature. Bartram prefers a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon and does not rest the case for God's or nature's goodness on this kind of observation. Hence he writes that while

this paradise of fish may seem to exhibit a just representation of the peaceable and happy state of nature which existed before the fall, yet in reality it is a mere representation; for the nature of the fish is the same as if they were in Lake George or the river; but here the water or element in which they live and move, is so perfectly clear and transparent, it places them all on an equality with regard to their ability to injure or escape from one another.⁴⁰

It is almost as though these words were meant as a caution both to the reader of the Travels and to the unwitting naturalist who misreads the book of nature. Where they are in conflict, sentiment must yield to fact. Apparent benevolence is not true benevolence. Properly understood, the situation in this clear lake is more like Thomas Hobbes' state of nature than it is a prelapsarian, liquid Arcadia.⁴¹ These fish forbear attacking each other only because an antagonism of equals, without the advantage of murky hiding places from which to attack and into which to retreat, produces an unproductive standoff.

Bartram did not question that the natural order, taken as a whole, manifests its maker's benevolence. If, however, one approaches nature as many natural theologians of the Enlightenment did—as a system in which every part and detail can be shown to be good—the yield is little more than unsound arguments and non sequiturs. N. B. Fagin seems to have missed this point in his usually perceptive analysis of Bartram and his works. Discussing Bartram's view of nature as the revelation of God's goodness, he writes:

The objective scientist in Bartram occasionally observes a phenomenon in nature which clashes with the concept of benevolence; his description, for instance, of a spider pouncing upon a bee, inflicting wounds like a butcher, and finally devouring it, is quite horribly realistic. But such disquieting moments are rare in Bartram. Nourished upon the ideals of the mid-eighteenth century, Bartram accepts the physical world of God as wholly good. …⁴²

The case is not quite what Fagin suggests. Neither Bartram's description of the predatory spider nor, to cite another example, his account of the warlike behavior of alligators is at odds with his belief in the general goodness of nature.⁴³ It is important to notice that Bartram's conclusion to his description of the spider's hunt is a reminder that the spider became probably that same day “the delicious evening repast of a bird or lizard.”⁴⁴ This is but one example of the balance, economy, and control maintained by nature itself. Those who pick out a spider's hunting practices as evidence for indifference or disharmony in nature do no better than those who look to leaping shrimp or sporting bream to argue for its goodness. For Bartram it is the entire scheme, the clockwork of nature, that testifies to a principle of benevolence. Separated from the general system into which it fits, a particular phenomenon is inconclusive as a basis for arguing for or against nature's goodness or that of its creator.

In Bartram's vivid description of troublesome insects, one can see clearly the extent to which his views as a working naturalist differ from those of the closet naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Once again, a comparison between Paley and Bartram is useful.

Bartram refused to glorify insect pests merely to demonstrate that everything which exists is, in itself and in its actions, good. Paley, on the other hand, felt the need to reconcile God's benevolence, especially towards man, with the existence of insects. What place can venomous and stinging insects have in nature? By appealing to the principle of plentitude, Paley could argue that their presence does not mar an inherently good world. His own second-hand knowledge of the New World was well-suited to his defense:

We complain of what we call the exorbitant multiplication of some troublesome insects, not reflecting that large portions of nature might be left void without it. If the accounts of travelers may be depended upon, immense tracts of forest in North America would be nearly lost to sensitive existence, if it were not for gnats. … Thus it is that, where we looked for solitude and death-like silence, we meet with animation, activity, enjoyment—with a busy, a happy, and a peopled world.⁴⁵

Bartram too is stirred by the exuberance of the American wilderness; and in prose no less lyrical than Paley's, he chants a litany to life and light:

At the return of morning, by the powerful influence of light, the pulse of nature becomes more active, and the universal vibration of life insensibly and irresistibly moves the wondrous machine. How cheerful and gay all nature appears!⁴⁶

Indeed, Bartram went further than Paley. He believed that what Paley later called “sensitive existence” belonged to certain native American plants.⁴⁷ It was, however, unthinkable to Bartram, as he made his way in June through the wilderness of Georgia, that he could celebrate the existence of stinging flies and gnats. No argument for the goodness of God or his world arises from his unforgettable description of these insects and the pain they inflict. He there finds no joy in the fullness of nature:

Biting flies are of several species, and their numbers incredible. … They are armed with a strong sharp beak or proboscis, shaped like a lancet, and sheathed in flexible thin valves; with this beak they instantly pierce the veins of the creatures, making a large orifice from whence the blood springs in large drops, rolling down as tears, causing a fierce pain or aching for a considerable time after the wound is made. … Whenever we approach the cool shades near creeks, impatient for repose and relief, almost sinking under the persecutions from evil spirits …, we are surprised and quickly invested with dark clouds of these persecuting demons, besides musquitoes [sic] and gnats.⁴⁸

Encounters with annoying insects do not, of course, induce Bartram to question nature's design or goodness. Creation as a whole always excites his “admiration, and equally manifests the almighty power, wisdom, and beneficence of the Supreme Creator and Sovereign Lord of the universe.”⁴⁹ It is not, however, his function as a naturalist to justify his admiration in the face of discomfort and impediments to his work. To believe that stinging flies, mosquitoes, and gnats somehow contribute to the fullness and goodness of nature is one thing, and to offer arguments supporting that belief is another. Bartram chose not to argue the case. He gives us instead a vivid, descriptively accurate account of these flies (hippobosca and asilus) and their debilitating effects on mammals. We do not get a tortured theodicy intended to prove, in the absence of acceptable evidence, that such beasts fill a niche in the scale of nature and are, therefore, an element essential to the perfection of the whole.

III. Scientific and Normative Description: Mayflies and Snakes.—Up to now I have been concerned to point out some representative examples of the claim that Bartram's science is unencumbered by his theological conviction that nature is the handiwork of a benevolent deity. It is also clear that his descriptions of the animal inhabitants of this value-laden world are unaffected by his moralizing or by his normative evaluations of their behavior. Even among those few instances in which Bartram appears to be less interested in natural history than in viewing the natural order as an exemplification of some virtue or value, his observations remain sound and ring true. His descriptions of (a) ephemerae (short-lived Mayflies) and of (b) benevolent rattlesnakes help to illustrate and to support this claim.

(a) Bartram's discussion of the “incredible numbers of small flying insects, of the genus termed by naturalists Ephemera,” is one of the most detailed in the Travels. He sees these flies among the shores of the St. John's river in the spring of 1774. His remarks end in reflection, but a description takes precedence. He first describes the mature flies' emergence, after having spent almost a year in the larval stage, from the shallow waters of the river. Their initial instinct is to mate and to deposit their eggs; thus their life cycle is both complete and continuous:

This resurrection from the deep … commences early in the morning, and ceases after the sun is up. At evening they are seen in clouds of innumerable millions, swarming and wantoning in the still air, gradually drawing near the river. They descend upon its surface, and there quickly end their day, after communicating their eggs to the deep; which being for a little while tossed about, enveloped in a viscid scum, are hatched, and the little Larva descend into their secure and dark habitation … where they remain gradually increasing in size, until the returning spring: they then change to a Nymph, when the genial heat brings them, as it were, into existence, and they again rise into the world.⁵⁰

This is, however, only part of the story. A full description also includes some remarks on the place of these insects in the food chain of the river and its environs; for most of them become “delicious food for birds, frogs, and fish.” Here Bartram the scientist and Bartram the romantic converge. Not content merely to describe the swarming of these flies and the feeding of fish upon them, he continues:

How awful the procession! innumerable millions of winged beings, voluntarily verging on to destruction, to the brink of the grave, where they behold bands of their enemies with wide open jaws, ready to receive them. But as if insensible of their danger, gay and tranquil each meets his beloved mate in the still air, inimitably bedecked in their nuptial robes. … With what peace, love, and joy do they end the last moments of their existence!⁵¹

Bartram speculates that there are annually more of ‘these beautiful winged beings, which rise into existence, and for a few moments take a transient view of the glory of the Creator's works” than there have been men since creation itself.⁵² The brevity of their being—only a few days of which are spent in adulthood—quickens his own reflections on the shortness of human life. This is followed by a long and detailed concluding paragraph on the existence of ephemerae during their subaqueous phase:

Their whole existence in this world is but one complete year: and at least three hundred and sixty days of that time they are in the form of an ugly grub, buried in mud, eighteen inches under water, and in this condition scarcely locomotive, as each larva or grub has but its own narrow solitary cell, from which it never travels or moves, but in a perpendicular progression of a few inches, up and down, from the bottom to the surface of the mud, in order to intercept the passing atoms for its food, and get a momentary respiration of fresh air; and even here it must be perpetually on its guard, in order to escape the troops of fish and shrimps watching to catch it. … One would be apt almost to imagine them created merely for the food of fish and other animals.⁵³

There can be little doubt that the life cycle of these Mayflies appeals to Bartram's reflective nature. Some might prefer to see natural history and all other scientific literature free of contemplation and musing. Others may wish that Bartram, perhaps following the model of Newton's Principia, had confined his philosophical and theological ruminations to a series of separate, well-defined notes. But unless it can be shown that Bartram's reflections interfere with his science, these preferences do not signal a fundamental weakness in his description or procedure.

The important question is, therefore, whether Bartram's moralizing distorts or diminishes his account of the ephemerae. The answer is that it does not. Neither the sentiment of the moralist nor the metaphorical excesses of the poet weaken or deflect the eye of Bartram the naturalist. “In fact only one sentence in three pages suggests a turning away from the very short period of that stage of existence (as mature flies), which we may reasonably suppose to be the only space of their life that admits of pleasure and enjoyment, what a lesson doth it not afford us of the vanity of our pursuits!”⁵⁴

If this sentence offends a scientist's or positivist's sense of what counts, nothing else that Bartram says about the ephemerae should; for the rest is verifiable fact. What finally matters is the accuracy and completeness of his account of the life span, reproductive cycle, and environment of these Mayflies. Here his precision and comprehensiveness have enabled entymologists to make a probable identification, out of hundreds of varieties, of the species of flies he describes.⁵⁵

(b) Bartram's insistence that rattlesnakes are generally benevolent seems both to transcend his purely scientific interests and to be descriptively less rigorous than what he says about Mayflies or about any other animals and plants in America's wilderness. Here, more than anywhere else in the Travels, critics write of his surprising credulity, i.e., of his suggestion that rattlesnakes hypnotize their prey.⁵⁶ But a careful reading of the text does not make it clear that Bartram believes in the fascinating power of these snakes. He writes merely that “they are supposed to have the power of fascination in an eminent degree” and that it is “generally believed that they charm birds, rabbits, squirrels, and other animals.”⁵⁷ This is neither a testimony nor an argument for a rattlesnake's hypnotic capacities: and it falls short of the exaggerated, often absurd claims of others in America who accepted, without question or suspicion, the reptilian folklore of the eighteenth century.⁵⁸ Bartram simply includes the prevailing view of a facet of the rattlesnake's behavior. He does not, as Crèvecoeur does in the Letters from an American Farmer (1782), lead his readers to believe that he has himself witnessed instances of predatory fascination.⁵⁹ One might, of course, criticize Bartram for not rejecting this piece of rural mythology even as he had rejected a variety of extravagant theories of bird migration.⁶⁰ Nonetheless, the unwillingness to dismiss a claim is not, in the sciences, equivalent to accepting it; and Bartram does not, in the only passage in which he mentions it, defend or embrace the position that rattlesnakes infatuate their victims.

Bartram discusses the rattlesnakes of the Southeast (“where they are the largest, most numerous and supposed to be the most venomous and vindictive”) largely to justify his claim that they have benevolent and peaceful dispositions. He might also have reasoned that it is a straightforward illustration of the general goodness of nature that some of its creatures have the power to do harm but forbear doing it. He insists that there is ample evidence for the benevolence of the dreaded rattlesnake; and while in this case he is more interested in the moral economy of the natural world than in descriptive herpetology, his appeal is empirically grounded:

Since, within the circle of my acquaintance, I am known to be an advocate or vindicator of the benevolent and peaceable disposition of animal creation in general, not only towards mankind …, but always towards one another, except where hunger or the rational and necessary provocations of the sensual appetite interfere, I shall mention a few instances, amongst many, which I have had an opportunity of remarking during my travels, particularly with regard to the animal I have been treating of [the rattlesnake]. I shall confine myself to facts.⁶¹

He mentions “the dignified nature of the generous though terrible” rattlesnake which harmed neither him nor his friends as they camped for the evening on a small island near the mouth of the Altamaha river. Without knowing it, everyone had passed by and perhaps even disturbed the snake.⁶² Bartram writes with compassion and regret that as a boy he killed a rattlesnake while traveling with his father near St. Augustine. He had stopped only a few inches short of the huge snake:

Another step forward would have put my life in his power, as I must have touched if not stumbled over him. The fright and perturbation of my spirits at once excited resentment; at that time I was entirely insensible to gratitude or mercy. I instantly cut off a little sapling, and soon dispatched him. … I, however, was sorry after killing the serpent, when coolly recollecting every circumstance. He certainly had it in his power to kill me almost instantly, and I make no doubt that he was conscious of it.⁶³

There are also praises for the moccasin and objections to those who malign or confuse it with its pernicious cousins. It is, Bartram says, “a very beautiful creature, and I believe not of a destructive or vindictive nature.”⁶⁴ Bartram was himself unable to substantiate any claim that one had ever killed or seriously injured a human being. He concludes, on the basis of his own numerous observations and in the absence of any reliable contrary evidence, that the moccasin is “an innocent creature with respect to mankind.”

These accounts and anecdotes do not, of course, constitute the best and most insightful science in the Travels. Other American travelers had reported, years before the publication of Bartram's work, that rattlesnakes were not aggressive.⁶⁵ Bartram was less concerned to reveal new truths about snakes than he was in confuting the spurious hearsay surrounding their behavior toward men. This hearsay was more insidious than the bites of these reptiles; for in Bartram's estimation it wrongly portrayed certain residents of the living world as indiscriminately cruel. He wanted to set the record straight; and backed by his own experience, he argued for what approaches common knowledge today, viz., that snakes, like most other undomesticated animals, are shy and passive. They are predators only when their survival demands that they be.⁶⁶

Bartram overstates the case when he ascribes benevolent motives to snakes. As the debate between ethical altruists and egoists proves, it is difficult enough to determine what motives and intentions underpin human conduct. It is just as difficult to say, with justifiable confidence, that reptiles act out of conscious benevolence.⁶⁷

That Bartram's view of the motivation of snakes is unlikely or untenable is not in itself a sufficient reason to dismiss what he says of their observable behavior. His remarks about their behavior arise not from a normative theory of intentions but from his own frequent encounters with southeastern vipers. He wants his readers to know that some species of poisonous snakes, especially those native to the New World, are benevolent; and though a strange claim, it is not one that colors what he observes. For whatever reasons, rattlesnakes try to avoid, rather than to conflict with, human beings. The same is true of moccasins. Bartram sees their behavior towards humans as a manifestation of their beneficence. Someone else may see it as evidence that snakes are shy or secretive. The interpretations vary, but the behavior or trait to which each appeals is public and verifiable. We should not, in this instance, discount Bartram's observations on the grounds that his interpretation of them is idiosyncratic.

It is equally important to notice that Bartram's report is more than an encomium to reptiles. He lists and discusses about a dozen kinds of snakes, and some of them offend even his generous sensibilities. If, for example, he believes that most snakes are innocent of their unfortunate reputations, he does not believe it of the ground rattlesnake; he first describes it and then states why that creature deserves neither a defense nor sympathy:

This little viper is in form and colour much like the rattle snake, but not so bright and uniformly marked: their head is broader and shorter in proportion to the other parts of their body: their nose prominent and turned upwards: their tail becomes suddenly small from vent to extremity, which terminates with three minute articulations resembling rattles. … This dangerous viper is from eight to ten inches in length, and of proportional thickness. They are spiteful, snappish creatures. … They seem destitute of the pacific disposition and magnanimity of the rattlesnake, and are unworthy of alliance with him.⁶⁸

The detail in this passage is impressive. Anyone who reads it should recognize a ground rattlesnake if he has the misfortune to meet one. We can identify this snake and be careful of it. Bartram has done his job as a descriptive naturalist. The fact that he dislikes the snake and resents its being called a rattlesnake is incidental to his description.

The remainder of Bartram's account of southeastern snakes is, apart from its detail, unexceptional. He identifies the coach-whip snake, the ribband or coral snake, the chicken and bull snake. He mentions in passing the water snake, the black snake, and the garter snake.⁶⁹

Bartram is not a herpetologist of the highest rank. He is, nonetheless, among the first to make responsible and enduring contributions, both in his Travels and in his drawings, to the study of American reptiles. His achievements in this area are acknowledged by contemporary zoologists and by historians of the biological sciences,⁷⁰ and these achievements are undiminished by such comparatively minor sins as the failure to reject snake fascination or his too zealous defense of the benevolence of rattlesnakes and moccasins.

IV. Conclusion.—Because much has been written—though not very recently—about Bartram and his influence, I have here dealt with a question that others seem generally to have neglected, i.e., that of the relationship between Bartram's normative view of the world, on the one hand, and his capacities as an objective naturalist, on the other. He makes no attempt to separate facts from values nor does he see nature in terms of this separation. I have tried to show that in spite of his firm belief in the inherent worth of creation and the goodness of its architect, his science is not distorted by his sentimentalism nor are his observations diminished by his moralizing.

I agree with Fagin that what “Bartram has depicted is the result of the observation of a scientist, poet, and philosopher, a combination which was unique in his day and which has kept his work alive in our own day.”⁷¹ There is, however, more to it than that. This combination sustains the Travels as a classic in science and literature not only because it is a blend of interests but also because Bartram does not allow one kind of observation to frustrate another. He wrote about nature as a poet and sometimes thought about it as a philosopher; yet his metaphors and morals never overpower the scientific aims of his odyssey. He went in order to explore the American wilderness, to collect specimens from it, and to learn all that he could about its animals, plants, rivers, and terrain. These things ought, as he says in the opening of his book, to be the chief concern of the naturalist. The significance of the Travels is that its author took his own imperative seriously and did so well what he set out to do.

Notes

1. For a sketch of John Bartram's life and attainments, see N. B. Fagin's William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore, 1933), 2-7; hereafter cited as Bartram. John Bartram helped Benjamin Franklin to establish the American Philosophical Society, cultivated America's first botanical garden, belonged to the Royal Society of London, and served as the king's botanist. Carl Linnaeus, the celebrated Swedish taxonomist, called Bartram the “greatest natural botanist of the world.”

2. Bartram's contributions to botany and natural history include, among many others, the first known drawing of the Venus Flytrap, his descriptions and drawings of alligators, turtles, and other southeastern reptiles and amphibians, and, above all else, his and his father's joint discovery of the Franklin Tree (Franklinia alatamaha). This rare plant, named for Franklin and found near Fort Barrington, Georgia, has not been seen in the wild since 1803. See J. Ewan's William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788 (Philadelphia, 1968), 60, 62, 78; hereafter cited as Bartram's Drawings.

3. Ewan discusses the connection between Fothergill and the Bartrams. At the time Fothergill decided to support Bartram's excursion, he himself maintained England's largest botanical garden. Bartram's Drawings, 6-7.

4. Bartram's exact itinerary is difficult to trace because of his backtracking and because some of the place names have been changed over the years. H. G. Cruikshank, in her John and William Bartram's America (New York, 1957), 379f., has reconstructed his route.

5. Fagin, Bartram, 10. Fagin has a chapter on Bartram's Indians, 56-68; and Ewan discusses his anthropology briefly in Bartram's Drawings, 29-30. For some notes documenting the influence of Bartram's Travels on Chateaubriand's Atala, see Atala/René, trans. I Putter (Berkeley, 1952), 115-18 passim. J. L. Lowes, in his Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1927), 365-70, has established the unquestionable influence of Bartram on Coleridge.

6. Ibid, Bartram, 11, 128f.

7. Cruikshank, John and William Bartram's America, 372-73. Writing to Jefferson, Bartram declined the invitation because of his “advanced age and consequent infirmities.”

8. Fagin, Bartram, 37-55 passim.

9. The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1948), 54.

10. Ibid., 55

11. Two instructive discussions of the design argument and its problems are M. H. Carré's “Physicotheology” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York, 1967), VI, 300-05, and F. Ferré's “The Design Argument” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1973), I, 670-77.

12. There are some useful comments on Hume's criticism of the design argument in Ferré's introduction to William Paley's Natural Theology: Selections (Indianapolis, 1963), xxi-xxvii; hereafter cited as Natural Theology.

13. Ibid., xxi.

14. For an account of the theory of evolution and its forerunners, see L. Eiseley's Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (New York, 1958). For a discussion of the impact of evolutionary theory and of the theologically biased background against which it emerged, see Philip P. Wiener's Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), ch. 1.

15. Hume's History of England was part of Bartram's private library. Fagin, Bartram, 20.

16. The Travels of William Bartram, ed. M. Van Doren (New York, 1928), 21; hereafter cited as Travels. This is an unabridged edition of the Travels published in Philadelphia in 1791. Van Doren brings the spelling and punctuation up to date.

17. Ibid., 15.

18. Ibid., 17.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. See E. A. Armstrong's discussion of natural symbolism in Saint Francis: Nature Mystic (Berkeley, 1973).

21. Travels, 234.

22. Ibid., 15

23. Ibid., 82.

24. Fagin, Bartram, 48.

25. Bartram, Travels, 70

26. Ibid., 66-67.

27. Natural Theology, 3-12.

28. Ibid., 84. For some discussion of others, from Saint Augustine to the New England Transcendentalists, who thought of the natural world as a sacramental realm that everywhere testifies to God's goodness and providence, see A. H. Armstrong's “St. Augustine and Christian Platonism” in Augustine: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (New York, 1972), 14, 32-33.

29. The admonition to follow nature is itself ambiguous. Butler and More had in mind behaving under the direction of the highest faculty of our nature, viz., reason. The forest primitive of Rousseau's Origins of Inequality follows nature by acting out of instinct and natural compassion, not out of the conceits and sophisms of reason. The Stoics, who placed following nature or living in accordance with it at the center of their ethical doctrine, intended the recognition of Nature's universal purpose and the conforming of our conduct to it. See Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, ed. and trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1963), xi-xii.

30. In his John Ray: Naturalist (Cambridge, England, 1950), 452-478, C. E. Raven discusses amalgams of natural theology and natural history in seventeenth-century thinkers like Henry More, John Ray, and William Derham. What he says about Ray is, as one would expect, especially informative.

31. Bartram, Travels (Philadelphia, 1791), 21.

32. Fagin, Bartram, 38.

33. See, for example, Paley's Natural Theology, 61, 74-77, and George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), sections 152-54, in Berkeley's Philosophical Writings, ed. D. M. Armstrong (New York, 1965), 126-127.

34. Natural Theology, 54.

35. Ibid., 55.

36. Bartram, Travels, 157.

37. Ibid., 157-58.

38. Ibid., 158-59.

39. Ibid., 150.

40. Ibid., 151.

41. Hobbes, in his description of competitive equals in the natural state, characterizes life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Leviathan (1651), Pt. I, ch. xiii.

42. Fagin, Bartram, 38.

43. Bartram, Travels, 115f.

44. Ibid., 25.

45. Paley, Natural Theology, 65-66.

46. Bartram, Travels, 159.

47. Ibid., 19-20.

48. Ibid., 310-11.

49. Ibid., 20-21.

50. Ibid., 87-88.

51. Ibid., 88. Paley also refers to the “sportive motions” and the “joy and exultation” of Mayflies (Natural Theology, 54). Perhaps Bartram goes too far when he writes of the joy and tranquility of primitive insects; but he, unlike Paley, draws no unscientific conclusions from his own remarks. He does not translate the joy of newborn flies into a proof of God's benevolent intentions toward his creatures.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 89.

54. Ibid.

55. See Ewan, Bartram's Drawings, 27.

56. Boorstin is one of those surprised at Bartram's comments on the hypnotic powers of snakes. The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, 27.

57. Travels, 222.

58. D. Hawke gives examples of this extreme lore in The Colonial Experience (Indianapolis, 1966), 299, 300.

59. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. W. B. Blake (New York, 1967), 172-73. Less well-known than Crèvecoeur's book is John Lawson's History of North Carolina (London, 1714). Lawson writes that rattlesnakes “have the power or art (I know not which to call it) to charm squirrels, hares, partridges, or any such thing, in such manner that they run directly into their mouths,” 133.

60. Travels, 234-35.

61. Ibid., 222.

62. Ibid, 223.

63. Ibid., 225. The snake that Bartram killed was an Eastern Diamondback, the largest poisonous snake in America. Ewan, Bartram's Drawings, 79.

64. Ibid., 226.

65. See, for example, Robert Beverley's The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705), 300-01.

66. See S. and M. Minton, Venomous Reptiles (New York, 1969), 119-20.

67. Paley does not speculate on the higher motives of venomous snakes, but he does insist that a rattlesnake's bite is not so deadly as most believe and that men are themselves indictable for disturbing snakes on their own ground. “We invade the territories of wild beasts and venomous reptiles and then complain that we are infested by their bites and stings.” Natural Theology, 63.

68. Travels, 227.

69. Ibid., 187-88. Bartram's skills in the visual arts are obvious in his drawings of the snakes he describes in the Travels. These drawings are not, however, included in the Travels and are not my concern here. They are reproduced in Bartram's Drawings, plts. 29, 50, 53, 58.

70. See Ewan's comments and references in Bartram's Drawings, 23, 169.

71. Bartram, 80.