Exploring old worlds
at the Philosophical Society

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

The five featured subjects of the American Philosophical Society’s latest museum exhibit have been called many things.
Collectively, their vocations have been diverse, including astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, instrument maker, ornithologist, naturalist, hunter, artist, photographer, naval officer, physician, cartographer, botanist and ecologist.
Rarely are any referred to as "explorer."
But in a word, that’s precisely what all five subjects are, says Sue Ann Prince, director and curator of the museum. Besides that, they all were or are APS members, and all have direct connections to Philadelphia.
More than 100 artifacts from the lives and careers of David Rittenhouse, John James Audubon, Titian Ramsay Peale, Elisha Kent Kane and Ruth Patrick comprise Undaunted: Five American Explorers, 1760-2007, which opened on June 22.
The display is inside Philosophical Hall, at 104 S. Fifth St., on Independence Mall. Admission is free, though a donation is requested.
"I’m trying to blow open the word ‘explorer’," Prince said, explaining that the exhibition’s organizers purposely adopted a most liberal definition of that key term.
"The common thread throughout is that exploration unsettles existing knowledge," Prince said. "Also, what they all had was this spirit of undauntedness. They weren’t just laboratory scientists. They went out into the field."
Audubon, for example, did not illustrate and catalog hundreds of bird species by having captured specimens delivered to a studio. Rather, he spent decades hunting them through the backwoods of early 19th-century America — from Pennsylvania, New York and eastern Canada to the Carolinas, Florida, Kentucky and Louisiana.
"Audubon is not typically referred to as an explorer. He’s referred to as an artist," Prince noted, "but he went out into the wild and killed a lot of birds."
Similarly, Peale was considered an accomplished artist and natural-history collector, despite lacking formal scientific training, when he was chosen as zoologist for the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a naval squadron that sailed the globe for four years to chart navigational routes and collecting exotic wildlife.
"Peale and his colleagues sent back 241 new charts and maps and forty tons of specimens," Prince said. "That’s another way to be an explorer, to go out into the field and send things back for later study."
The exhibit as a whole can best be described as a potpourri of artifacts representative of the five subjects and their work. Four lived in the 18th and/or 19th centuries. Patrick is the lone living subject. She will turn 100 in November.
Most of the items on display are part of the APS’ permanent collection of some 10 million manuscripts, books and objects.
Some inclusions were a given, like the society’s copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, the bound collection of the creator’s life-size color illustrations of indigenous birds dating from 1827 to 1838. There are 120 known copies. One sold at auction seven years ago for $8.8 million.
"This has never before been shown publicly. The colors are really stunning," Prince said.
The Audubon section also delves into the ego-fueled rivalry between him and his contemporary ornithologist and Philadelphian Alexander Wilson.
"It was (about) whose images were the best," Prince said.
Unlike Audubon, perhaps, other subjects of the exhibit found universal popularity and even heroic status as a result of their much-publicized exploits.
Peale (1799-1885) was a native Philadelphian born in the very same building that now houses the exhibition. His father, Charles Willson Peale, founded the nation’s first museum there.
Following in his father’s footsteps as an artist and collector of natural history, the younger Peale sailed on the USS Peacock for four years, covering 87,000 miles. In that time, he experienced bloody encounters with Pacific Islanders, strengthened U.S. claims to the Oregon Territory and helped prove Antarctica as a continent.
His artifacts include a 5-foot scale model of the Peacock, maps of Hawaii and the Antarctic coast, a Fijian nose flute, Hawaiian human-hair necklace and a Tongan lice scratcher.
Kane (1820-1857) explored the opposite terrestrial pole. The naval doctor took part in two 1850s Arctic voyages to search for the lost party of Sir John Franklin.
At the time, Arctic exploration captivated public interest much like space exploration would a century later. As a result, his activities were recounted thoroughly in newspapers, photos, books and other media of the day.
"People were mad about the Arctic then. It was like going to the moon," Prince said.
On his second voyage, Kane’s brig Advance became stuck in polar ice. The crew was forced to abandon the ship. But through two years of battling the elements, starvation and illness, Kane and all but one of his party survived with the help of the local Inuit population.
Kane is credited with finding the Humboldt Glacier, the world’s largest; disproving the idea of a polar sea; and helping develop the Ice Age theory. Among the artifacts on display from his trips are a polar bear skull and his own drawings of his stricken colleagues and the Arctic landscape.
Rittenhouse (1732-1796), the earliest of the five exhibit subjects, may be best known today for the Center City square that bears his name. But as a contemporary of another APS member, Benjamin Franklin, he was a highly regarded Colonial scientist in his own right.
A self-taught mathematician, astronomer, instrument-maker and surveyor, Rittenhouse built his first clock by age 16. His technical abilities and inquisitiveness complemented one another as he developed innovative equipment that helped him chart the planet Venus in the 1760s and mark state boundaries.
His surveying of the Western Mason-Dixon Line separating Pennsylvania from Maryland in the 1770s and ’80s finally settled a longstanding dispute between the Penns and the Calverts, and completed the political boundary that would later symbolize the great ideological differences of the American Civil War.
The APS still has original cast moldings from the "crownstones" placed every five miles along the border, as well as vintage surveying equipment developed and used by Rittenhouse.
Like Rittenhouse, Patrick used technical innovation to overcome challenges in her scientific work. But she also had to overcome discrimination along the way.
Inspired by her father’s encouragement, Patrick developed a love of nature as a child and devoted herself to studying the natural world. But even after earning her doctoral degree in 1934, she was forced to work as a volunteer researcher for 11 years because of her gender.
Patrick persevered, however, to become a pioneer in the study of single-cell algae in inland bodies of water. She invented the diatometer to collect the microscopic organisms and spent countless hours waist-deep in streams such as Pennsylvania’s Conestoga River and South Carolina’s Savannah River.
She determined that the number and variety of diatoms in rivers and streams are indicators of the level of pollution and was the first to argue that the health of an ecosystem is best judged by the variety of species in it.
Patrick’s crude-looking but effective diatometers are on display in the exhibit, as are her scientific notes and drawings and a recent video interview of her.
"I hope (she) will be an inspiration to young women coming to the show," Prince said. ••
For information about the Museum of the American Philosophical Society, visit www.amphilsoc.org/exhibitions or call 215-440-3440.
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com