The Sociable Sciences: Darwin and His Contemporaries in Chile

The Sociable Sciences reconstructs the social world of naturalists who traveled to or within Chile in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Patience Schell superbly tells a chronological narrative using overlapping biographies of the preeminent figures involved in the often thrilling and wonder-filled enterprise of natural history fieldwork. She situates these naturalists in the historiography of science and of friendships. Schell typifies the excellence in scholarship on creole science and natural history in the making that will interest social historians, historians of science, and scholars of the transnational nineteenth century.

This story begins with the most familiar, Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, and then expands out to the French botanist Claudio Gay, who changed the way Chileans viewed nature. Other naturalists include Ignacio Domeyko, a Polish exile, Manuel Montt, a future president, and the Prussian brothers Bernardo and Rodulfo Philippi, who...