TURNBULL LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT HOLDINGS IN THE HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE: A REVIEW

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 9, Issue 2, 1 October 1976, Page 4

TURNBULL LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT HOLDINGS IN THE HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE: A REVIEW

Michael E. Hoare

What Cook has added to the mass of our knowledge is such that it will strike deep roots and long have the most decisive influence on the activity of men. George Forster, 1787 1

Cook’s major legacy to the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand was European settlement and science: his discoveries came near the beginning of a new awakening in the European scientific consciousness and his spheres of exploration had the novelty, scope and expertise to arouse, stimulate and further new ideas on the origins of man and nature. The Pacific therefore was and remained a repository of modern European science, and our civilizations there, indigenous and colonial, drew on and contributed in fundamental ways to the development of European science.

In 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Arthur Saunders Thomson, surgeon to the 58th Regiment in New Zealand (1847-58), an expert Maori ethnologist, meteorologist, zoologist and respectable statistician, noted in his The Story of New Zealand —undoubtedly up to then the best general review of scientific research in New Zealand to appear since Dieffenbach’s Travels (1843) —that New Zealand presents one of the best proofs in the world that every portion of the earth has its own peculiar forms of animal and vegetable life .... [and is] an admirable geological school. 2

Sixty years later, at the first New Zealand Science Congress in Christchurch in 1919, Leonard Cockayne, a world figure in botanical ecology, remarked that a ‘history of New Zealand science itself in its various branches [would] form the basis for future advances’ 3 and, seven years later, in a Legislative Council debate on the Health Report on the future of scientific and industrial research in the Dominion, George Malcolm Thomson, the country’s best informed scientific politician, confidently asserted that ‘the immense amount of research carried out in New Zealand had been probably for its population more than in any other part of the Empire’. 4 With such a respectable legacy of scientific research, experimentation, teaching and the application of science and its methods to the human experience and natural environments in New Zealand it is, perhaps, time for historians to consider introducing this field of intellectual, social

and organisational development more firmly into the country’s historiography. Elsewhere I have critically reviewed what has been attempted in this sphere. 5 Here it is our purpose to review the wealth and occasional weaknesses of materials in the history of science deposited in one repository, the Turnbull Library. Other New Zealand repositories, too, possess valuable items in the field, in some topics richer and in others supplementing those resources of the Turnbull. Clearly not all items or collections can be surveyed here; rather the attempt is made to set the collections within the preliminary framework of a critical historiography of science for New Zealand. ‘Science’ here means anthropology, medicine, technology as well as the physical and life sciences. I have avoided, too, the sometimes spurious division between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’.

I. Cook’s Legacy and the French Connection, 1766-1820 Fortunately, since both Australia and New Zealand have produced many fine scholars and researchers into the European origins of their societies, and nurtured, moreover, collectors of rare books and manuscripts which form the bases of our national and provincial collections, it is no surprise to find the Turnbull Library endowed with materials, some originals and many copies, relating to the sea-borne antecedents of our European civilizations and the state of indigenous Pacific societies at the time of first European contacts.

For the acquisition of many copied materials from the ‘Cook period’—part of the ‘Banksian era’ of British science (1770-1820) —we owe a considerable debt to the Turnbull Library’s staff and to Cook’s Boswell, J. C. Beaglehole (see e.g. contemporary copies of correspondence with Admiralty, etc. (qMS 1768-71) and ‘Journal’ of the Endeavour from the original in the Australian National Library, Canberra. The same applies in some measure for materials relating to Sir Joseph Banks, whose letters and journals, 1768-1810, including correspondence with Bligh, Solander, the Forsters etc. from the Mitchell Library, Sydney (MS Papers 155) and letters and papers relating to Cook’s voyages, 1745-1815, from the Webster Collection (qMS 1745-1814) are represented in Turnbull.

Of considerable interest to scholars of Cook’s and Banksian science is the two-volume contemporary transcript of Banks’s Endeavour ‘Journal’ (qMS 1768-1771) made for his friend Captain Constantine John Phipps, R.N., and Banks’s holograph instructions on the breadfruit tree drafted for the gardener on the Bounty expedition, one enterprise which arose, of course, out of Cook’s scientific explorations. These ‘instructions’ (Bp.), bound with a broadsheet published by the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce on 22 January 1777 offering premiums for successfully conveying the bread-fruit to London and

giving an extract of John Ellis’s description of the plant, were incorrectly dated and bound under ‘1777’ in an original Turnbull binding (qMS 1777), but their origin most probably was circa 1787. Correspondence between Banks and Thomas Pennant and others is to be found in MS papers 155. As Beaglehole latterly conceded, the science of Cook’s voyages owed most to his ‘philosophical’ expert companions, the Linneans and others who sailed with him. From the second voyage (1772-75) the Library possesses ‘Nota relativement aux Curiosites Artificielles qu’on a rapportees de la Mer du Sud’ (Misc. MS 1169), dated London, 17 February 1778, and purportedly in the hand of George Forster. It is a catalogue of Pacific artefacts, giving bread collecting locations, and possibly prepared for sales which the elder Forster hoped his son would make after a visit to Paris in October and November 1777. 6 Of considerable importance for any student of the scientist’s role and attitudes on voyages of discovery is the two-volume journal log kept by William Bayly, astronomer in the Adventure under a rather lax commander, Tobias Furneaux, and again in the Discovery on the third voyage (qMS 1772-9).

More problematical, however, is a small volume (19 x 14cms) entitled ‘Hodges’s Drawings of New Zealand Plants’ (ElO4/Art) containing twenty coloured sketches of plants, some only partially completed. The provenance of this item is obscure but there is some slight indication from the handwriting and signature that one of the Forsters — possibly an artist daughter of J. R. Forster?—may have had some part in the work. There are several entries in various hands including two-and-a-half pages of brief descriptions of eight plants. Four folios also appear to be missing since the plants are numbered only from 5 to 8 and thereafter there is no further numbering. The ‘voyage’ provenance of this item deserves further research, since its attribution to Hodges is open to doubt.

The scientific voyages of the eighteenth century aroused an immense interest in linguistic anthropology —a tradition continued ably by missionaries and in which later New Zealand scholars excelled. Sir Charles Blagden’s ‘Notes on Polynesian Languages’ (qMS c 1790), from originals in the Library of the Royal Society of London, provide a useful introduction to students investigating the origins of European linguistic perceptions in the Pacific, a study by Banks, the Forsters, French observers and others.

New Zealand remained for many decades a frontier zone of contact for European science, part of the greater Pacific strategy of scientific and political exploration. For the French this involved seeing New Zealand as part, and not at first a central part, in their thinking on the Mer du Sud. Jean-Baptiste-Charles Bouvet de Lozier suggested a

strategy for circumpolar Antarctic navigation three decades before Cook’s second voyage 7 (see e.g. photocopy letter of instructions for an expedition in L’Aigle (qMS 1739) from the originals in the Bibliotheque Nationale). Marchant argues justifiably for greater attention from Anglo-Saxon scholars to the role of the French in New Zealand development before 1840 s. Before 1826-27 —the date of Dumont D’Urville’s second visit—Marchant suggests French exploration was ‘characterized by science and cartography’. 8

Marchant shows that Australian and New Zealand records tend to be poor regarding French activity in the region because of a contemporary British failure to take cognisance of France’s well-defined ‘prescriptive rights’ in the Pacific. For science itself, it must be admitted that Turnbull seemingly stood in this same British tradition vis-a-vis French achievements. Dunmore has listed copies of French exploration materials in the Library before 1969 9 and for what is available in French repositories in detail on science Marchant is the authority. To understand more fully the very neglected field of French contributions to scientific research in the New Zealand Group more materials would need to be acquired from the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where, for instance, are deposited natural history manuscripts of scientists like Commerson (with Bougainville), Labillardiere (with D’Entrecasteaux), Quoy (with Freycinet), R. P. Lesson (in the Coquille under Duperrey, 1822-25) and so on. Here, too, are housed, further valuable Forster manuscripts on New Zealand natural history. 10 As a repository of copied records of the French voyage principals rather than the subordinate scientists the Turnbull is, however, a good starting point for research (see e.g. the microfilm collection (Micro MS 325-31 and 337-44) of Records of French Exploration in the Pacific, 1701-1849, as well as copies of the exploration records).

While science at one level became part of the ‘rivalry’ between British and French enterprise in the southwest Pacific, at another level, in their convict settlements in New South Wales, Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land, the British were unconsciously founding new centres and bases for scientific research in the region. The decade 1810-20 marked the nadir of British science at home and in the colonies. In matters taxonomic, for instance, the ‘natural methods’ of the de Jussieus were applied to Pacific life forms in France as a protest against the Linnean system’s so-called ‘artificiality’, but when Robert Brown, Matthew Flinders’s botanist, did the same in his excellent Prodomus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen (London, 1810) it was a publisher’s disaster.

British science in ‘Australasia’ was for the first time temporarily compelled to look largely to its own resources. The death of Banks in 1820 confirmed the passing of an era. 11

11. Forging ‘local’ science traditions, 1820-1860 In British science as in much else New Zealand became a ‘frontier’ dependency of New South Wales and then, temporarily perhaps, of Hobart Town. 12 It is at this point, in preparation for a later potent fact of New Zealand scientific life, the ‘Australasian scientific community’ —so strong up until 1914-18 and perhaps for a decade thereafter—that we can commence the closer more detailed documentation of a New Zealand scientific tradition (or rather traditions).

Was John Savage, the Sydney rebel surgeon and pioneer vaccinator, the forger of this Trans-Tasman scientific tradition when he called at the Bay of Islands in 1805? How much was scientific curiosity about New Zealand aroused in Sydney and Hobart by tales and observations borne back by whalers, sealers, traders and missionaries? In 1821 the little Philosophical Society of Australasia commissioned competent men in the ship Surry to carry out a scientific survey of Macquarie Island while prospecting for seals. In that year, too, wrote Douglas Mawson later, there ended an important phase of subantarctic exploration.

Journals such as those by J. R. Kent (in the Mermaide in 1823 (Micro MS 504)) and John Boultbee (in New Zealand 1825-28, (qMS 1817-34)) 13 give us some indication of the sort of ‘scientific gossip’ — perceptive, stimulating and tempting—which reached and surely was passed around Sydney and Hobart Towns. In 1826 Samuel Stutchbury, later Government Geological Surveyor in N.S.W. (1851-55) was at the Bay of Islands in March and April as naturalist to the Pacific Pearl Company (1825-27). This seminal phase of his Pacific experience has only been more fully revealed through the recently acquired ‘Journal’ and notes on Stutchbury (6 vols., fMS 1825-55).

From correspondence examined in Turnbull something of the excitement, influence and intimacy between the scientific teacher, Allan Cunningham from N.S.W., and the botanical pupil, William Colenso at Paihia, Bay of Islands, that cradle of New Zealand science, can be captured. Cunningham came first in 1826 but laterfollowing his brother Richard at Whangaroa and Bay of Islands, 1833-34—he returned to set Colenso more firmly on the path of a life-long scientific career. 14 Central to this relationship and its ramifications in science are Cunningham’s papers, 1816-28 (7 vols., fMS 1816-1828, including the ‘Journal’ of 1826, original in Sydney), the extensive Colenso collections (e.g. MS COL 1853-63, typescript journals and letters and MS 1838-1880, correspondence with R. C. Gunn and the Franklins (Tasmania), J. D. Hooker, etc.); the letters of Colenso (qMS 1836-1898) and his scientific ‘heir’ in Hawkes Bay, Henry T. Hill (MS Papers 4; 146 and 172) and the J. D. Enys materials, containing inwards correspondence from Cunningham, James Hector and others (MS Papers 670).

Other trans-Tasman influences on an emerging New Zealand science tradition included J. C. Bidwill (family papers MS Papers 1323); Lady Jane Franklin (MS Papers 375); C. A. A. von Huegel (see correspondence with A. Hamilton and von Haast (MS Papers 1256/1 and MS Papers 37/106) and his uncatalogued ‘Journal’ from original in Dixson Library, Sydney), and one whose Australian experience, although important, was minimal when set against his far-seeing theoretical and practical contributions to provincial and later science and technology in New Zealand—particularly in Wellington and its Province—J. C Crawford. The Turnbull holdings of Crawford’s letters, correspondence, publications and works surely rank as one of the most significant on any individual active in New Zealand science before 1890 (MS Papers 1001).

Colenso’s establishment at Paihia became one small mecca for the ‘frontier’ scientists visiting New Zealand. Science in the 1830 s ran neck-and-neck with the rising tide of colonising, idealism and other outside interest in New Zealand. At the formal level of administration much of the islands’ destinies were closely linked with men like James Busby (see e.g. his correspondence from originals in Auckland Institute and Museum (qMS 1833-1834)), Edward J. Eyre, William Hobson and George Grey, whose Australian experiences in science and related matters were important. This nascent governmental influence on New Zealand science is exemplified in the work of Dr Andrew Sinclair, Colonial Secretary, 1844-56, who used the travel opportunities of his office to advance science (see his typed manuscript letters and journals (MS 1844-1856) from originals in the General Assembly Library and other correspondence in McLean Papers and Mantell Papers, etc.). Others who stood in the same tradition of science in government or in the government service included A. S. Thomson—whose correspondence unfortunately is poorly represented in Turnbull —David Monro 15 (e.g. MS 1842-54), a government-oriented advocate of science in Provincial and General Government assemblies; Walter L. Buller (qMS 1892-94, qMS 1888 and MS Papers 48) ; Isaac E. Featherston, (represented in others’ correspondence e.g. Mantell and von Haast) ; Edward Shortland, ‘a profound Maori scholar’, (see e.g. qMS 1844) and copies of his journals in the Hocken Library and Auckland Institute (Micro MS 354-57 and 396) and Walter B. D. Mantell, a descendant from strong scientific stock through his father Gideon A. Mantell FRS, who bequeathed to New Zealand some very significant papers in the history of science.

More so than in Australia—except perhaps in South Australia—the Company settlers, especially in the founding phase between 1840-1860, left New Zealand with strong intellectual-scientific traditions as part of their commitments to education, improvement and intellectual pursuits.

In this regard, although dependent upon Australian inputs in the earliest phase of forging her scientific traditions, New Zealand later drew strongly upon the re-emerging influences in Britain. When the French had finally departed after 1846 science in New Zealand became the meeting ground primarily for English, Scottish and German scientific traditions, traditions richly varied and occasionally conflicting.

Rev. Richard Taylor (MS Papers 254 and 953, MS 1843-50 and MS 1830-54), Colenso and others represented the clerical-missionary tradition, so strong in philology and linguistics; A. S. Thomson stood as a representative of the military and medical influences, out of which sprang, too, many of the surveyors. The Nelson settlers with their Literary and Scientific Institute (1841) came already equipped to plant their ready-made culture on a receptive soil of their own tilling, and some settlements, particularly Otago and Canterbury, were founded with strong ideas on the relations between the structures and institutions (including the scientific ones) of society. Thus there was started the strong legacy of provincial science, an understanding of which is fundamental to an understanding of national science.

Walter Mantell and William Swainson FRS were two representatives of the important Banksian English amateur tradition in science who settled in and bequeathed to New Zealand their inheritance: their counterparts in Sydney were the members of the Maclay family and circle. Turnbull possesses copies of Swainson’s botanical notes made in Australia (1853) from the originals in the Mitchell Library (Micro MS 503) and the Art Room holds the original drawings of eucalypts he made while in Australia (E 131). Copies of the Swainson family papers (qMS 1810-79) provide another departure point for the study of a man whose ideas on philosophical zoology and classification as a Quinarian had earned him a world-wide reputation in science long before he migrated to New Zealand in 1840-41. 16 The Art Room also houses remarkable volumes of Swainson drawings, sketches and prints of mammalia, birds, insects and plants. The sometimes repeated remark that Swainson did nothing for science after reaching New Zealand is, in the light of these collections alone, absurd.

The most arresting proof that the English tradition—particularly in classical geology—reached New Zealand by the middle decades of the nineteenth century lie in the Mantell collections housed in the Turnbull. We could hardly wish for a better comprehensive introduction to the principal figures of English and New Zealand geology and science from the early part —to geologists the historically classical part of the last century (see esp. MS Papers 83, MS 1822-52, qMS 1839, qMS 1813-43, qMS 1814, MS ca. 1843, MS 1830-1852, all containing Gideon Mantell materials). Under qMS 1821-51 are letters of G. A. Mantell to Charles Lyell (2 vols) and qMS 1830-61 those to Benjamin Silliman (4 vols).

The Mantell Papers are replete in scientific correspondence between Walter and Gideon and a Scrapbook (originally qMS 1810-1840) of circa 300 pages containing many zoological drawings by William Swainson (now under E295/Art). Correspondents represented in the Mantell Papers include J. L. R. Agassiz, C. Babbage, the Brogniarts, Robert Brown, William Buckland, J. D. Dana, Humphrey Davy, W. M. Fitton, Davies Gilbert, W. J. Hooker, Roderick Murchison, Richard Owen, J. Sowerby and H. E. Strickland. W. B. D. Mantell’s New Zealand correspondents include John Buchanan, Buller, Colenso, J. C. Crawford, Featherston, H. O. Forbes, J. von Haast, O. Hadfield, James Hector, Alexander McKay, and others. Quite apart from correspondents overseas and Walter’s other letters, reports and journals (e.g. MS Papers 940 and MS 1847) these papers form the starting point for any serious study of the interaction between workers in anthropology and the geological sciences in New Zealand from 1840 s to 1890 s. As a bonus of plenty in an already replete cornucopia of scientific historiography the Mantell Papers also contain William Swainson correspondence from sources like J. G. Children, Allan Cunningham, John Gould, R. H. Schomburgk, A. Sinclair, S. Stutchbury (1828-53), an important supplement to Swainson correspondence held in the Linnean Society of London. To my knowledge the Mantell holdings must rank as one of, if not the most comprehensive, original nineteenth century collections relating to the history of science in Britain and Australasia in any Australasian repository.

Scientists rarely work successfully in isolation—perhaps this was Swainson’s dilemma?—and New Zealand’s were no exception. The massive corpus of correspondence and interaction between individuals in the Australasian colonies, some of it reviewed here, shows that we can speak confidently now of a continuous informal association within New Zealand science from 1830 s onwards as a part of the region’s science. In 1837 Sir John Franklin formed the Tasmanian Natural History Society which became the rallying point in its excellent Journal for the Australasian scientific community in 1840 s and in 1851 it was taken as the obvious model for the New Zealand Society formed under Sir George Grey in Wellington (MS Papers 121), a most remarkable early manifestation of the determination to institutionalise science. 17

In 1852 the Auckland Museum was started and throughout the 1850 s there emerged a greater awareness among the scattered workers and embryonic scientific communities in mechanics’ institutes, libraries and collections that science could be an important part of improvement and development. Visiting ships again brought British (and American) scientists to New Zealand (e.g. Horatio Hale manuscripts, qMS 1839-40 and MS 1840) and some like J. D. Hooker (qMS 1868-70) became seminal influences on the country’s science (see also Micro MS Coll 10,

manuscripts from Kew 1766-1938). In 1839-41 the presence of Ernst Dieffenbach (MS Papers 798 and 1109 and in MS 1839) as naturalist to the New Zealand Company had seemed to portend a continuing government commitment to scientific investigation but that hope was shattered by Governor Gipps’ parsimonious policies from N.S.W. 18 Rather it was the initiative of one representative of New Zealand’s own nascent scientific tradition in Auckland, the inventive, innovative, versatile Dr A. G. Purchas—who persuaded his Provincial Government to employ Ferdinand Hochstetter, geologist to the Australian Novara expedition, to examine brown coal deposits from the Hunua field. This heralded the next era of New Zealand science in 1859-60: the age of growing governmental involvement and the institutionalisation of science. Hochstetter, who re-introduced the German-Austrian tradition of science into New Zealand, is represented in Turnbull by correspondence in the Haast Papers (MS Papers 37) and in other smaller items (Misc. MS 338 and MS Papers 915).

111. Provincialism and Hectorian Centralism, 1861-1905 At first the initiatives lay and were firmly grasped by the emerging scientific cultures at the provincial level. Julius von Haast, later Provincial Geologist in Canterbury (1861-68), accompanied Hochstetter on an apprenticeship survey introduction to New Zealand natural history in the North Island and Nelson (MS 1858) and remained in the country to represent the great Humboldtian tradition of German science as a resident leader and doyen of institutionalised science in Christchurch (see esp. MS Papers 37 and 171). 19 Haast correspondence appears in other collections including those of E. P. Ramsay (MS Papers 942), the Australian naturalist; Mantell (MS Papers 83); J. D. Enys (MS Papers 670) and Sven Berggren (MS Papers 1002).

In 1862 J. C. Crawford (MS Papers 1001), the importance of whose papers we have mentioned above, was appointed Provincial Geologist for Wellington and at the same time came the appointment of James Hector to Otago in the same capacity. Science now throve —whether wholly efficiently is another matter —on interprovincial rivalry and a degree of local determination to emulate Otago’s rather successful applications of science and technology to problems arising from the prosperity of the gold-rush period. For governments, Provincial and General, the scientist now emerged in the guise of one who might, when economy demanded, find minerals, coal and other wealth to tide a sagging exchequer and workforce over until better times on the land, the run and the overseas markets. But the scientist saw himself as more fundamentally useful and motivated than that. How motivated and how useful w r e can judge from the original materials now available on this period of embryonic professionalism

in science. Hector, for instance, set up the first government scientific establishment in New Zealand —other than a survey —in Dunedin when he brought in the competent analyst William Skey and employed the botanist and draughtsman John Buchanan (qMS 1860-90, inwards correspondence of Buchanan from, among others, F. von Mueller, T. Kirk, A. McKay, from originals in Mitchell Library). Buchanan’s sketchbooks are also in the Art Room, full of interesting botanical and zoological illustrations and other scenes (E209/Art). Indeed the topic of scientific drawing, painting, sketching and visual representation in New Zealand and the Southwest Pacific is one which any serious student might commence in the Turnbull Art Room. Bernard Smith 20 has opened our eyes to the possibilities in this direction, but infinitely more remains to be done. 21 Most early scientists in the field were also competent sketchers and sometimes painters.

Otago, also with an intellectual head-start, has gone some way towards elucidating its scientific-technological-medical origins using the archival and documentary evidence available abundantly in the Hocken Library. 22 The Hector Collection, for instance (Hocken Library M 442-45) was used by Burnett and Ewing towards an assessment of Hector’s role as a geologist and scientist in Otago. The greatest chagrin for any serious student of Hector, however, is the almost faceless anonymity of the man after his move to Wellington in 1865 to preside over the most extensive science empire in any Australasian colony before 1890-1900. He it was who confirmed for science in New Zealand as distinct from medicine—although he was an Edinburgh MD—the ascendancy of the rich Scottish scientific tradition. The Turnbull holdings on Hector, properly analysed and sifted, may give us more insights into Hector the man as opposed to the formal scientific bureaucrat. Hector correspondence is found, for example, among the Atkinson (MS Papers 91), Buller (MS Papers 48), Haast, Enys, Berggren and McLean Papers and there are other papers, journals and miscellaneous items relating to Hector’s work (qMS 1871, qMS 1863, qMS 1863-4, qMS 1862).

Even by the mid-1860s it was clear that New Zealand, however strong the internal rivalries, had neither the long-term resources nor abilities to sustain unlimited and questionably efficient provincial financial commitments to science. The New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865, the first public demonstration of the colony’s potential and achievements in science and industry, confirmed the follies of continuing largely unco-ordinated resource and map surveys within the confines of artificial provincial boundaries. Under MS 1865, qMS 1865, MS Papers 707/1-2 and qMS 1865 Turnbull possesses a valuable collection of correspondence, jurors’ reports, essays and papers relating to machinery and other technology which usefully supplement the official record of this Exhibition. Here is one record of the state of New Zealand science in 1865,

if studied against the Hocken Library holdings of the same Exhibition (e.g. MS 39, 334, MSq7AL and Minutes of Meetings of the Commissioners) .

Hector, with support from the Weld Government, moved his scientific establishment to Wellington in 1865. But provincial science and its associated institutions largely survived, although hard pressed, the centralisation and consequent dwindling of provincial fiscal resources by appealing to local sentiment and support for funding and management. Hence the comparative richness of New Zealand provincial scientific societies, institutions, museums and collections. The coming of the University Colleges bolstered, indeed renewed, provincial scientific efforts. The Turnbull Library houses some evidence of this provincial academic activity in the papers and correspondence of A. C. Gifford and A. W. Bickerton (MS Papers 259), a valuable record of their common interest in astronomy and other things. We do well, I think, not to dismiss Bickerton too lightly as a crank. 23 The ‘Auckland tradition’ is represented by copies of Thomas Kirk’s correspondence with T. F. Cheeseman (qMS 1869-98). 24 The present research is showing that for a more thorough-going appraisal of the emergence of science in the provinces ample collections exist already in the research libraries of the respective centres, e.g. Auckland Institute and Museum (whose manuscript holdings in this area are considerable), Canterbury Museum, Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, Nelson Provincial Museum and, of course, the Hocken Library. 25 Research by others like C. A. Fleming and G. Parsonson is demonstrating the potency of the traditions and legacies of provincial science in the national scientific estate in the latter half of the nineteenth century and, indeed, down to the present time.

The setting up of central government scientific services in Wellington clearly had a quickening impact upon the scientific life of the capital. 26 The principal official scientific archives generated by Hector’s establishment which comprehended the Colonial (later Dominion) Museum, the Geological Survey, Colonial Laboratory, Observatory and Botanical Gardens are today housed in the National Museum in Wellington, which also possesses records relating to the Wellington Philosophical Society and the New Zealand Institute of which Hector was manager. 27 Whatever the later criticisms levelled at Hector’s science empire—and they were many and in some cases justified—it did provide a most useful training ground and introduction to local scientific problems and possibilities for generations of scientists. Frederick W. Hutton (correspondence in MS Papers 941 and 1256 and Misc. MS 1096) and Alexander McKay (MS 1863-c 70, qMS 1865 and MS Papers 242) were two scientists who contributed much and gained correspondingly from their work with the Geological Survey. The ‘Wellington school’ of science, if such we may call it. was surely

one important ‘invisible college’ in New Zealand science. It embraced men like James Park, Thomas Kirk (see qMS 1869-1898 cited above and letters to the Hookers in Kew, qMS 1890-1898 and official correspondence as Chief Conservator of State Forests, 1885-1888, qMS 1960, typescripts from National Archives) and, later, Leonard Cockayne (represented in qMS 1909, MS 1971) and George Hogben (qMS 1861-1904), both as I see it, key figures in the reform of New Zealand science in the first decades of the twentieth century. 28

During Hector’s reign the mood and political philosophy of the century changed but the central scientific establishment largely did not and, consequently, when the Liberals challenged the old values in the 1890 s their utilitarian practical expediency forced out the unreformed theory and practice of a bygone era. 29 As one result Hector’s empire was dispersed back to other government departments and science was obliged to reform itself internally—as some in the University of New Zealand were seeking to do in that institution in the face of considerable conservatism. 30

Facets of the decline and fall of old-world outmoded approaches in science and the newer attitudes may be gleaned from the Hutton, Kirk and other correspondence in many of the collections already cited including the Buller, Enys, Haast, and Mantell papers. The new ideas appear, too, in the correspondence and work of men like the Thomsons, G. M. and J. A., father and son (represented in Hill Papers MS 172, Haast Papers MS Papers 37 and Enys Papers MS 670). I think it can be shown that in many matters scientific, awareness ran ahead of political and community—urban and farming—awareness in assessing what the real needs were for New Zealand as she moved into the twentieth century with its new technical and scientific challenges. The triumph of scientific-technical ‘reform’ over ‘conservatism’ in the old ‘gentleman amateur’ tradition which had sustained science in the Company settlement days came slowly with the First World War and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. It was predicted, fought for and gained by those who were aware of irreversible trends overseas. New Zealand’s leading scientists were not insular throughout this period. It is a pity that we do not yet have, apparently, the papers — in Turnbull at least —of the Cottons, Kirks, Thomsons and others to show us how far-seeing they indeed were.

IV. Twentieth Century Directions Since science grew exponentially in the present century its records became in consequence more diffused. The question might well be asked how well or how much have specialists, government, DSIR and university departments set out to preserve their archives. The answer, alas, might be rather hair raising!

In the Turnbull Library the bases for some studies in twentieth century science are being laid. Antarctic scientific exploration is one area. Records are extant of the British Antarctic Expedition (MS 1907, qMS 1908, qMS 1908-09, MS 1907-09) and later expeditions (e.g. Micro MS 754, MS Papers 880/1-2, MS Papers 405 and the A. S. Helm Papers on the Ross Sea Committee and Trans-Antarctic Expedition). Aviation is represented in some items (MS Papers 240, M. W. Buckley and MS Papers 419, H. M. Mackay’s papers). Medical studies and records are another area where more preservation should be attempted to supplement the holdings of, for example, R. B. Bakewell on medical conditions in the New Zealand contingent to the Boer War (MS 1892-1908) and the diary of the versatile, remarkable Agnes Bennett as a medical officer in the First World War (included in Bennett Papers MS Papers 1346). Dr Agnes Bennett, indeed, exemplifies in the collection housed in the Turnbull the immense scope and creativity of a woman in science and society.

When the daunting yet necessary task of attempting a critical study in depth of New Zealand contributions to Polynesian anthropology is undertaken the extensive Turnbull papers of J. C. Andersen (e.g. MS Papers 148), P. Buck (e.g. MS Papers 775, Micro MS 599), Elsdon Best (e.g. MS Papers 72, MS 1899- and qMS 1901-31) and the records of the Polynesian Society 1845-1940 (MS Papers 1187) and its editor S. P. Smith will provide a vital fundament. The earlier story can undoubtedly be studied in the papers of missionaries and other scientists (e.g. A. Hamilton, MS Papers 1256, Correspondence with prominent scientists, 1861-1910). If anyone proposes studying the conservation movement and wild life protection in New Zealand a start might be made with W. L. Buller’s letterbook (1892-94) to Ballance and Seddon on Little Barrier and Resolution Islands as bird sanctuaries (qMS 1892-94) or by examining Buchanan’s, Cockayne’s and others’ earlier reports and correspondence as well as more recent materials (qMS ca. 1947 and MS Papers 1069). MS 1867 contains descriptions by Albert Kilminster of the early Wellington bush environs. Under MS Papers 444 are the records (1922-71) of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society.

However widely we interpret the possibilities of scientific life in twentieth century New Zealand there is evidence throughout of some rich and varied thinking. MS Papers 904 contain records of the first Town Planning Conference in Wellington in 1919 and qMS 1909-1919 the Rhodes Scholarships Applications. The modern meteorological historian would find scope in S. L. Muller’s early observations for Blenheim, the Wairau and Nelson (MS 1861-91 and MS 1862-90), from a Raoul Island diary of 1908-11 (qMS 1908-11) and the Martin family station diaries of 1879-85 (Micro MS 487).

It would be appropriate to close this review by referring to the papers of a man and his pupil who representatively gave new directions to modem science and to New Zealand’s place in the world of science i.e. Sir Ernest Rutherford and Sir Ernest Marsden. Under MS Papers 560 is Rutherford’s letter of 11 September 1903 to Isenthal asking for the despatch of pure radium to Montreal for his research and under Misc. MS 1445 two letters of Rutherford to his former and much misused teacher Alexander Bickerton. Marsden, who emigrated to New Zealand under Rutherford’s influence, became one architect of modem New Zealand science especially as Secretary of DSIR, 1926-1947. His extensive papers (MS Papers 1342) reflect a life-time’s devotion to scientific culture and practice in New Zealand and the Pacific.

The above review of scientific holdings in the Turnbull Library has, despite the wide-ranging interpretation of science, necessarily left some areas and individuals unnoticed. Rather than aim for ‘completeness’ it has sought to indicate the possibilities for the science historian in one repository by developing the importance of certain themes and setting them against the holdings and the country’s scientific development and strengths. It has been seen that G. M. Thomson’s and Cockayne’s confidence in New Zealand’s past scientific accomplishments is vindicated by the unpublished and published record.

In 1787 one of Cook’s scientists, George Forster, was confident that his Enlightenment world of science would leave a permanent mark on the Pacific. The variety of people, traditions and scientific works and research accomplished in New Zealand is and was remarkable for a country of its size and population. What remains now is to document its development more thoroughly and at that level of scientific and historical awareness demanded by the modern world of scholarship in the history of science, medicine and technology. Faced with these records we have, no student can any longer doubt the role of New Zealand as a centre for research, teaching and ideas in all branches of ‘science’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of the staff of the Turnbull Library, particularly those of the Manuscript Room, in facilitating research and access to the many papers discussed in this review. As elsewhere throughout the world the scholar finds himself beholden mightily to those who curate, know and respect the collections with more than ‘professional regard’.

NOTES 1 Quoted from George Forster’s essay on Cook discussed and partially translated in M. E. Hoare, ‘Cook the Discoverer: an Essay by George Forster, 1787’, Records Australian Academy of Science , 1(4), 1969, pp. 7-16.

2 Thomson, A. S. The Story of New Zealand, past and present, savage and civilised. London, 1859, vol. I, pp. 12 and 20. 3 Presidential Address to first N.Z. Science Congress, N.Z. J. Sci. Tech. 1 (4-5), 1919, p. 241. 4 Second reading debate on Health Report, Legislative Council, 8 August 1926, N.Z.P.D. vol. 210, pp. 222-26. 5 Hoare, M. E. Beyond the ‘filial piety’: science history in New Zealand, a critical review of the state of the art (Second Cook Lecture, 1976), Melbourne, Hawthorn Press, 1976 (at press). 6 See Hoare, M. E. The Tactless Philosopher: Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-98). Melbourne, Hawthorn Press, 1976, pp. 175-77. 7 Spate, O. H. K. ‘Between Tasman and Cook: Bouvet’s Place in the History of Exploration’, in Andrews, J. (ed.), Frontiers and Men: A Volume in Memory of Griffith Taylor (1880-1963), 1963, pp. 174-86. 8 Marchant, Leslie R. ‘The French Discovery and Settlement of New Zealand, 1769-1846: A Bibliographical Essay on Naval Records in Paris’ Hist. Studies Aust. & N.Z. 10, 1963, pp. 511-18 and ‘France and New Zealand: 1769-1846: a List of Naval Records in Paris’, 26 pp., mimeographed, Dept, of History, University of Western Australia, Perth (1962). A copy of this is in the Manuscripts Room, Turnbull Library, where there are also lists of French scientific materials in French repositories. 9 Dunmore, J. French Explorers in the Pacific. Oxford, 1965 and 1968, vol. 11, pp. 392-95.

10 Listed more fully in Hoare, Tactless Philosopher, p. 375. 11 For some consideration of this and other aspects of historiography of N.Z. science see Some New Zealand Contributions to Science and Medicine, 1769-1903 (Essays accompanying a Catalogue of Exhibition held at a meeting of the Australian College of Physicians, University of Auckland, 16-17 February 1976), Auckland, Pelorus Press, 1976. 12 Hoare, M. E. ‘The relationship between Government and Science in Australia and New Zealand’ Jl. Roy. Soc. N.Z., 6(3), 1976, pp. 381-94. 13 See e.g. Starke, June, ‘John Boultbee in New Zealand, 1825-1828’, Turnbull Library Record, 9 (n.s.) (1), 1976, pp. 18-30. 14 For some discussion of this aspect of Colenso’s career and a brief consideration of science in New Zealand see Bagnall, A. G. and Petersen, G. C. William Colenso . . ~ Wellington, 1948. 15 For Monro and his place in N.Z. science see Wright-St. Clair, R. E. Thoroughly a Man of the World: a biography of Sir David Monro MD, Christchurch, 1971. 16 See Winchester, Iris M., ‘William Swainson, F.R.S. 1789-1855 and Henry Gabriel Swainson, 1830-1892’ Turnbu Library Record, 1 (n.s.) (1), 1967, pp. 6-19. 17 Hoare, M. E. ‘ “All things are queer and opposite”: Scientific Societies in Tasmania in the 1840s’, Isis, 60 (2), pp. 198-209 and Bastings, L., ‘History of the New Zealand Society, 1861-1868. a Wellington Scientific Centenary’, Trans. Roy. Soc. N.Z., 80 (3-4), pp. 359-66. 18 Bell, Gerda. Ernest Dieffenbach: Rebel and Humanist. Palmerston North, 1976, esp. pp. 80-84. 19 See Von Haast, H. The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast . . . Wellington, 1948. The MS of this monument of ‘filial piety’ is deposited in the Turnbull Library under MS 1948. 20 Smith, B. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 . . . London, 1960.

21 See e.g. McLernon, C. R. ‘Early Geological Maps of New Zealand’. N.Z. J. Geol. 18 (5), 1974, pp. 745-51. 22 Two Otago theses on Hector by J. L. Ewing (1929) and R. M. Burnett (1936) were based upon the Hocken Collections. Among more recent studies are those by A. B. Mcßobie, ‘An administrative history of the Otago Museum’ (M.A., Univ. of Otago, 1966) and G. S. Parsonson, ‘A brief history of the Otago School of Mines, 1871-1971’, (pamphlet 8 pp. (n.d.) Dunedin). Professor Parsonson’s researches may well provide future models in New Zealand of the potential for local science history as part of the intellectual heritage in each province. Certainly the studies emanating from Otago have paved the way for much more in this field.

23 For a positive view of Bickerton see Burdon, R. M. Scholar Errant: A Biography of Professor A. W. Bickerton. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1956. 24 The serious student of Cheeseman would start, of course, in the Library of the Auckland Institute and Museum where, too, many scientific MSS are deposited. For Cheeseman see e.g. MS 57, 58 and 419 in that repository. The copies of the Cheeseman-Kirk correspondence in Turnbull are from the Auckland Institute. 25 I have been privileged to examine relevant papers in each of these institutions. The Taranaki Museum also has some very useful papers in this area of enquiry. The National Archives Collections are rich in departmental science. 26 This is not to deny the importance of the Wellington scientific community under Provincial Government. The Crawford Papers offer more insight into this for example.

27 This important collection is the veritable fundament of a national science archive. It is continued chronologically in part by the records and archives of the Royal Society of New Zealand for which see Hoare, M. E. ‘Archives of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1908-54 (formerly the New Zealand Institute)’, Archifacts/Bulletin of the Archives Committee of the New Zealand Library Association, 8 (July 1976), pp. 5-8. 28 Hoare, M. E. Reform in New Zealand Science 1880-1926 (Third Cook Lecture, 1976). Melbourne, Hawthorn Press, 1976. 29 See Dick, I. D. ‘The history of scientific endeavour in New Zealand’, N.Z. Science Review, 9(9) pp. 139-43. 30 Some of the ‘reformers’ indeed were academic scientists. See Beaglehole, J. C. The University of New Zealand: an historical study. Wellington, 1937.