Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field

practices of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Surveyq
Jeremy Vetter
Department of History, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Before many of the global environmental knowledge producing networks and technologies emerged
Received 15 January 2017 later in the twentieth century, another spatially extended form of field science was implemented at a
Received in revised form continental scale by the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, revealing similar tensions and dynamics.
27 August 2017
Specimens and observations from across continental spaces were integrated through railroad-based
Available online xxx
transportation and communications networks in order to map distributions of birds and mammals
and delineate “life zones” stretching across the continent. At the same time that field zoologists of the
Keywords:
Biological Survey produced this cosmopolitan scientific knowledge, they also developed an intimate,
Biological survey
Life zone
experiential knowledge of many of the places where they traveled. By following the travels of Biological
Field work Survey field parties, especially the agency’s long-time chief field naturalist Vernon Bailey, during the late
Vernon Bailey nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the railroad was dominant, this paper traces the in-
Experiential knowledge terconnections between the two ways of knowing in the Biological Survey’s practice. However, the
Cosmopolitan knowledge integration of these different forms of knowledge was ultimately partial and incomplete, as seen through
the Survey’s daily practices such as food consumption, the seasonality of survey field practice, and
limitations on what types of knowledge were incorporated from lay network collaborators and field
assistants.
Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
One of the most readily apparent losses when moving from the
local to the global is a robust sense of human experience in the
world. As a concept typically rooted in direct sensory perception of
the environment, “experience” seems difficult to transform into
something global, except as the relatively superficial experience of
travel as transitory sightseeing or a series of fleeting encounters
with interconnected places whose imposed sameness belies their
physical distance (think of airports or hotel conference rooms, for
example). Yet it is worthwhile to think about how environmental
scientists have attempted to face the challenge of “experiencing”
the natural world beyond the local, as they have constructed
technologies for sensing and measuring the environment, such as
global satellite imagery, along with conceptual tools that link
together disparate places into a coherent, integrated whole. This
work has proceeded not only at the fully global scale, but at other
intermediate regional scales, such as across single continents or
q This paper appears in the SHPS special issue Experiencing the Global Environ-
ment (Volume 70, August 2018).
E-mail address: jvetter@email.arizona.edu.
oceans, which themselves are vastly beyond the realm of ordinary
local experience. And, undeniably, such technologies and concep-
tual tools have made it possible to envision, or even apprehend, the
environment at larger scales, through direct encounters with rep-
resentations such as charts, maps, and photographs.
Nevertheless, the question remains whether the movement in
environmental experience from the local toward the increasingly
globaldwhatever its evident successesdmay still encounter
serious obstacles and limitations, which have prevented the
experience of global environments from ever being as robust as
local experience. In this paper, I will develop a case study that
predates the most impressive examples of global environmental
science from the mid-twentieth century onwards: the U.S. Biolog-
ical Survey operating on the continental scale during the railroad
era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing
on a regional and continental scale during an earlier period, we can
see many of the same tensions, dynamics, and challenges that
would later be revealed at an even more global scale.
As a plausible best-case scenario for experiencing trans-local
environments, consider the work of Vernon Bailey (1864e1942),
the Survey’s chief field naturalist from 1890 to 1933, an impressive
figure who arguably did more than anyone else to “know” the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
0039-3681/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
2 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
natural world of the entire North American continent, especially its
western half. Yet, as I shall argue, even his impressive and unusual
achievements in large-scale environmental perception were ulti-
mately limited in their reach. In the course of exploring the indi-
vidual and collective environmental experience that could be
generated through the Biological Survey, I will also bring in other
examples from the field sciences in the interior West during the
railroad era to illustrate points of interest, where especially sug-
gestive evidence is available. I will emphasize the distinct, com-
plementary, and irreplaceable role of experiential knowledge
possessed by those who know places firsthand, which could not
(ultimately) ever be subsumed by the knowledge of scientists
operating at larger scales.1 The limitations of scaling up the
knowledge of experience were generated not only by the impos-
sibility of rendering much of that knowledge in a systematic form
that could circulate more widely, but also by the (necessary?)
erasure of many aspects of human experience in scientific publi-
cations and the difficulty of fully encompassing the temporal
element of place-based knowledge.
2. “Experience” in the history of science
To be sure, the word “experience” raises complex issues for the
history of science, and it presents translational challenges between
English and other languages.2 Among historians of science, Peter
Dear (1995, pp. 4, 6) has played a generative role in scholarly dis-
cussions about “experience,” particularly for the early modern
period in Europe. For Dear, an older, Aristotelian sense of “experi-
ence” as “how things happen in nature”das the “ordinary course of
nature”dwas displaced during the seventeenth century by exper-
imental science focused on “how something had happened on a
particular occasion.” Experimentation could then produce “a his-
torical account of a specific event that acts as a warrant for the truth
of a universal knowledge-claim.”3 Dear (1987, p. 134) has also
argued that experiment itself was less pivotal than “the emergence
of discrete experience as the primary empirical component of
natural philosophy,” thus highlighting the centrality of the shifting
meaning of “experience” to the history of science. However, once
we recognize that “experience” in the Aristotelian sense, as
generating knowledge of how things happen normally in the or-
dinary course of nature, persists in the everyday experiences of
people who live and work in particular places, “experiential
knowledge” can be a useful category of analysis for later historical
periods too. Such knowledge may be contrasted with the
1
The most common word that is used to refer to what I am calling “experiential”
knowledge is “local” knowledge, which is a term that I sometimes use when it
seems appropriate. However, for analytical purposes, I am preferring “experiential”
in order to avoid presuming that the knowledge of experience must always be
strictly local, as well as to emphasize that this type of knowledge is not just a
smaller scale level of data that can be aggregated into global scientific knowl-
edgedrather, it often adds something complementary and independently valuable.
Some other frequently used terms that are similar to “experiential,” and which
often overlap with it in meaning and also identify this type of knowledge to varying
degrees, include: “vernacular” (Coen, 2012; Coen, 2013, p. 11; Pandora, 2001; Smith,
2004; Tilley, 2010; Valencius, 2013, p. 177), “indigenous” (Cooper, 2007), and “folk”
(Fan, 2004, p. 143).
2
Recently David Wootton (2015, pp. 312e313, 347), has thrown down the
gauntlet to mainstream historians of science, in a bold challenge to prevailing
historiographical interpretations across a wide range of key concepts in the history
of science, including “experience,” among many others, all in service of a larger
effort to reinstate the novelty of the “scientific revolution” and to define its pa-
rameters more exactly. While his strenuous effort to distinguish his own inter-
pretation positions it in a way that is probably too sharply overdrawn, it is
nevertheless and bracing and illuminating overview, especially of the key linguistic
shifts in the word “experience”.
3
See also Dear, 1985; Dear, 1991; and Dear, 2006.
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
experimental forms of knowledge production that were taking hold
among more distinguished philosophers from the late seventeenth
century onwards.
This shift was especially associated with English natural phi-
losophy, and scholars have charted how the French thought about
these matters differently (Dear, 1990; Licoppe, 1996). Linguistically,
of course, the French usage of “experiment” and “experience”
(either as the verb, expérimenter, or as the noun, expérience) were
typically overlapping. German speakers also lack an exact equiva-
lent to the English empirical and bodily-oriented “experience,”
although, as linguist Anna Wierzbicka (2010, pp. 84, 85) points out,
they have two distinct words of their own: Erfahrung, which “em-
phasizes knowledge gathered or obtained over time from many
situations that one has been in (usually when doing something)
and reflected upon,” and Erlebnis, which “refers to a special event in
a person’s life that is linked at the time with some emotion and is
remembered later.” It is a worthwhile and illuminating project to
trace these shifting and divergent meanings of “experience” in
different languages, and this instability should provoke some
caution, but at the same time we can use these other languages to
enrich the meaning of “experiential knowledge” as a crucial
analytical term for the history of science.
Thus, in thinking about the analytical term “experiential
knowledge,” while French offers a caution that there will always be
some blending of these different forms of knowledge, the German
Erfahrung can help distinguish and clarify the epistemic aspect of
“experience” as generative of knowledge (Wierzbicka, 2010, p. 84).
explication is useful here:
a. someone did many things at many times
b. many things happened to this someone at many times because
of it
c. this someone thought about these things for some time
d. because of this, this someone knows many things about things
of some kinds
This is not a bad synopsis of what many writers and speakers
mean by “experiential knowledge,” although the English version of
the word would likely place more emphasis on the bodily and
sensory aspects of experience. Moreover, the emphasis on the
particularity of experience as the foundation for knowledge pro-
duction since the early modern period is closely bound up with the
history of the modern fact, or “datum of experience, as distin-
guished from the conclusions that may be based upon it.”4 As
Lorraine Daston (1996) has argued, the earliest modern facts were
“strange facts,” even if from the eighteenth century onward the
concept broadened considerably to cover a much wider range of
ordinary and banal particularities.
Other historians have identified key transformations in the role
or nature of experience that preceded the rise of experimental
practice. These included shifts in England, as well as other parts of
western Europe, and in both domestic European and distant colo-
nial contexts. In sixteenth-century England, for example, Eric Ash
(2004, p. 213) has argued that “the very notion of expertise was in
flux throughout the century, shifting from an emphasis on personal
experience to the possession of a more theoretical kind of knowl-
edge and skill.” This earlier diminution in the role of experience in
the constitution of expertise reminds us that the seventeenth and
eighteenth century changes in more elite philosophy were taking
place in a social context where experiential knowledge might be
marginalized by new forms of higher-status knowledge. In the case
4
Oxford English Dictionary definition cited in Daston, 1988, p. 466. See also
Shapiro, 2000; Fontes da Costa, 2002; and Fontes da Costa, 2009.
 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
of Spain, by contrast, Antonio Barrero Osorio (2006, p. 7) has
focused instead on empire and New World commerce. In doing so,
he found a more hybrid system of knowledge production: “a culture
based on experiential and collaborative practices supported by
royal officials and merchants,” which generated “empirical culture
that, in turn, supported the development of modern science.”
Whether we focus on the displacement of experiential knowledge
or on its coexistence with newly emerging forms of knowledge-
dbeyond their differing subject matter, Ash and Barrero-Osorio
may actually be capturing complementary facets of the same
broad historical shiftdit seems clear that the experiential knowl-
edge possessed by artisans, merchants, farmers, and others who
made a living by working in the natural world was coming to
occupy a distinct role.
From the early modern period to the present, the knowledge of
experience has remained in the background even as modern, sci-
entific experimental and observational practices have become
established. Globalizing ways of knowing the environment such as
remote sensing and mapping, arguably, have overshadowed the
experiential knowledge of local and particular places. Accordingly,
scholars analyzing present-day science have been inquiring into
“how sensor technologies are generating distinct ways of pro-
gramming and concretizing environments and environmental re-
lations” (Gabrys, 2016, p. 4). Yet, other scholars of recent science
have noted the continuing importance of complementing stan-
dardized and remote sensing data with knowledge based on field
experience on the ground (Almklov, 2008, 2011; Monteiro & Rajão,
2017). Experiential knowledge endures, even if it has often been
marginalized.
Everyone has experiences, of course, including scientists. But to
render those experiences as trans-local scientific observations has
meant transforming them into scientific categories, language, and
often measurements. In addition to this, however, any environ-
mental scientist who has spent considerable time at a particular
field station or site has likely acquired a great deal of knowledge
based on experience of place, which goes beyond what was re-
ported as scientific data. “To situate field practice in its context,” as I
have noted elsewhere (Vetter, 2016, p. 17), requires us to “take
seriously the experiential knowledge possessed by lay people and
amateurs in the field, which often complemented what we
might”dreflecting the partially realized ideal of knowledge that
travels and avoids national, regional, or parochial attachmentd“-
call the ‘cosmopolitan’ knowledge of field scientists who encoun-
tered them, collaborated with them, and occasionally conflicted
with them in the practice of field science.”5
Much of that experiential knowledge in contrast to cosmopol-
itan knowledge could also be labeled as “residential” knowledge
(Kohler, 2006, p. 184), since those who acquired were those who
lived in a particular place over a lengthy period of time. Residing in
a place, to be sure, has been an important aspect of experience. In a
recent article about a “professional collector” in Colorado named
Charles Aiken, for example, Steve (Ruskin, 2015, p. 386) discusses
how Aiken possessed residential knowledge that his more cosmo-
politan collaborators did not. Through “his ability to mark changes
in population dynamics and habitats,” Aiken noticed the appear-
ance and disappearance of bird species over time. Nevertheless,
experiences have been derived through work and play as much as
at home.
5
On the imperfectly realized cosmopolitan ideals in an earlier period, see Daston,
1991. On the distinction between “cosmopolitan” and “experiential” knowledge,
and the participation of lay people in scientific observation, see Vetter, 2010; and
Vetter, 2011. A useful pluralistic philosophical perspective is Dupré, 1993.
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
3
Wherever experiential knowledge has been generated, field
scientists have often attempted “to bridge the rift between the
knowledge of experience based on living, working, or playing in a
particular place, and the cosmopolitan knowledge that travels well
between places and enables the facts from any one place to be
situated in larger taxonomies, categories, and comparisons” (Vetter,
2016, p. 17). People living in a place often know where to find
certain plants, animals, rocks, or fossils, for example, or how to
understand local signs of weather and topography. Such knowledge
has had a local “use value” that contrasts with the “exchange value”
of knowledge that can be situated in larger taxonomies and
frameworks by visiting scientists. Historians of science can think of
the “epistemic rift” between experiential and cosmopolitan
knowledgedanalogous to the “metabolic rift” in the history of
capitalism (Moore, 2000, 2011)das an important conceptual
framework for analyzing the scaling up of knowledge of the envi-
ronment from local and regional to continental and global.
The value of local experiential knowledge was recognized in the
late nineteenth century. For example, the American naturalist C.
Hart Merriam (1893, p. 353), who directed the U.S. Biological Sur-
vey, explained that he “would rather have the farmer’s boy who
knows the plants and animals of his own home than the highest
graduate in biology of our leading university.” At the same time, he
argued for bridging the epistemic rift, noting that a “chief disad-
vantage in manufacturing naturalists” from farm backgrounds was
that “they lack the education possessed by college-bred men,” and
the lack of that broaderdwhat I am calling cosmopoli-
tandknowledge would be “sorely felt” if it were not acquired. Thus,
he argued that “to be well equipped for this work, a naturalist or
biologist needs a college education.” Could Merriam and his col-
leagues at the U.S. Biological Survey successfully bridge this
epistemic rift between experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge
in their field practices?
3. The Bureau of Biological Survey: species distributions and
life zones
Under Merriam and his successors, the U.S. Biological Survey
operated under several different names, starting out as the Office of
Economic Ornithology in 1885, then adding Mammalogy to the
name, later attaining status as a Division, and eventually acquiring
even greater status as the Bureau of Biological Survey (Sterling,
1989). The Biological Survey was justified on the basis of its eco-
nomic purposes (e.g., predator control), but under Merriam’s
leadership it focused much of its work on mapping the geograph-
ical distributions of animals and ultimately the delineation of
transcontinental “life zones” where environmental conditions
shape the kinds of plants and animals that predominate (Neumann,
2017). Even those projects were legitimated in part by their larger
economic payoffs. They described life zones as authoritative guides
for agricultural activities in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
Yearbook (Merriam, 1894a, pp. 203e204), which included a black-
and-white hand-shaded map of North America showing the life
zones (see Fig. 1, from p. 210). In Life Zones and Crop Zones of the
United States, which included a color map of U.S. life zones
(Merriam, 1898, pp. 9, 12), expressed the Biological Survey’s goal as
“to define and map the natural agricultural belts of the United
States, to ascertain what products of the soil can and what can not
be grown successfully in each, to guide the farmer in the intelligent
introduction of foreign crops, and to point out his friends and his
enemies among the native birds and mammals, thereby helping
him to utilize the beneficial and ward of the harmful kinds.” Such
knowledge, he thought, “would be worth in the aggregate hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars yearly to the American farmer.” More
succinctly, the Biological Survey’s chief field naturalist, Vernon
4 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10

Fig. 1. Map showing life zones of the United States.

Bailey (1913, p. 7) wrote fifteen years later, “The practical purpose of
mapping life zones and their subdivisions is to show the extent and
location of areas in the several States in which certain farm prod-
ucts thrive and outside of which they can not be made to thrive.”
Life zones emerged out of a related transcontinental project to
map the geographical distributions of specific animal species and
varieties (see Fig. 2, from Bailey, 1915, p. 9). Collectively, those maps
would provide the evidentiary basis for delineating more general
life zones that encompassed all plants and animals together. In
1889, the Biological Survey began publishing its North American
Fauna series, which provided a venue for knowledge at the conti-
nental scale, beyond the more specific economic and taxonomic
studies that dominated the Biological Survey’s circulars and bul-
letins. The first of these, on North American pocket mice, explicitly
announced the Bureau’s interest in complementing its economic
studies with “mapping the geographical distribution of birds and
mammals” so that they could “ascertain the boundaries of the
natural faunal areas of North America” (Merriam, 1889, p. vii).
Based mostly on Bailey’s field work in four states and territories of
the West, this study established the field practice model for such
collecting and observing being done “mainly by special field agents
employed by the Division” along with “a smaller portion .
contributed by voluntary observers.” Most of this work was
accomplished by very small field teams, often consisting of just one
or two people. In principle, at least, this way of organizing work
enabled the possibility of combining knowledge at a continental
scale with the ground-level experience of field agents and lay
participants.
That same year, Merriam’s “life zone” concept gained its first
expression in the context of field work. Instead of awaiting the
completion of more completed studies of the geographical distri-
bution of individual species, however, it is notable that the first
description of life zones by Merriam occurred through field work at
a very specific field site. Rather than experiencing a variety of
environmental conditions across the North American continent,
Merriam first delineated life zones through his field work-
dtogether with several colleagues and assistants in a field party
that was larger than usualdon the San Francisco Mountains of
Arizona, in 1889. The report from this field work included not only
the mapping of the life zones at various elevations on and around
the mountains themselves but also the provisional mapping of the
life zones of the entire United States (Merriam & Stejneger, 1890).
This initial work in Arizona was followed in the next few years by
studies in south-central Idaho in 1890 and the famed Death Valley
Expedition of 1891 (Sterling, 1974), which also brought along larger
field parties than usual for the Biological Survey, attempting to
extend and refine the life zones for applicability across the conti-
nent. The five-man “biological reconnoissance of Southern Idaho,”
which covered some 20,000 square miles from summer to fall 1890,
was “hastily brought together” in order to address the “exceedingly
scanty” data on that region, where “all attempts to map the dis-
tribution of mammals or birds in the West, or to define the
boundaries of faunal and floral zones” had met with “an insuper-
able barrier, a veritable terra incognita.” (Merriam & Stejneger, 1891,
p. 1). Thus, it was not due so much to a concern that detailed, on-
the-ground experience was needed everywhere, but simply that
the least known areas needed extra scrutiny.
While the 1890 field work in Idaho was explicitly described as a
“reconnoissance” rather than a “detailed biological survey,” the
following year’s larger and better-funded Death Valley Expedi-
tiondwhich covered a large geographical area across four states of
the Desert Southwest, beyond just Death Valley itselfdwas labeled
as a full-fledged biological survey and produced about three times
as many pages of research results (Merriam et al., 1893). By 1894,
with the help of his colleagues in the field and considerable
experience on the ground in three distinct parts of the western
United States, Merriam had refined his life zones sufficiently so that
he could present them at his annual address as vice president of the

Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
Fig. 2. Map showing the distribution of the genus Thomomus(shaded area).
National Geographic Society, which has arguably become the most
important, widely-referenced version of the life zone framework. In
his address, Merriam (1894b, p. 229) announced that he had split
the conventional biogeographical regions known as the Boreal and
Austral into “three secondary transcontinental zones each”: Arctic,
Hudsonian, Canadian, Transition, Upper Austral, and Lower Austral.
Significantly, the last two zone names offered more general,
appropriately transcontinental names to replace the previous
names Upper Sonoran and Lower Sonoran from the original study
of the San Francisco Mountains of Arizona, which had more
strongly place-specific, regional connotations referring to the
Desert Southwest.
Along with the published version of this address, Merriam
presented three color maps of North America, showing not only the
life zones themselves but also temperature levels during the sea-
sons of growth and peak summer heat. These factors were at the
center of Merriam’s life zone framework, and his overwhelming
focus on temperature to the exclusion of other factors would
become the most frequently cited criticism of his theory. By
reducing the complex and variable environments of the entire
continent of North America to the single factor of temperature,
Merriam abstracted life zones from a more holistic appreciation for
the heterogeneous character of experiential knowledge on the
ground. “The history of field biology is littered with the wreckage of
single-factor theories,” notes Robert E. Kohler (2002, p. 118), using
as a prime example “Merriam’s theory that vegetation zones are
caused by differences in average temperature,” which would
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
5
become “especially galling to ecologists, who knew that other
factors were involved.” Thus, while scholars who have examined
the genesis and reception of Merriam’s life zone concept have
acknowledged its place-based origins in the Desert Southwest, they
have also contrasted it with other ways of looking at biogeography
even within that region itself. Unlike later researchers who studied
southwestern mountain ranges, such as Daniel Trembly MacDou-
gal, who emphasized variability, Merriam’s delineation of strongly
patterned life zones was well suited to seeing the big picture
(Maienschein, 1994). By contrast, MacDougal’s colleague at the
Desert Lab, Forrest Shreve, endeavored to disprove Merriam’s
simple temperature-based version of life zones, by using long-term
and instrument-based observations of the Santa Catalina Moun-
tains, near Tucson (Kohler, 2002, p. 129).
Even in the 1890s, when Merriam’s life zones were first artic-
ulated, there was published dissent from within the region: T. D. A.
Cockerell, who lived and worked at New Mexico Agricultural Col-
lege before making the majority of his career in a neighboring state,
at the University of Colorado in Boulder, complained about the lack
of fit of general descriptions of zones in New Mexico. In a letter to
Science, he presented a list of evidence that seemed to weigh
against Merriam’s characterization of the life zones in New Mexico,
especially in relation to agriculture, commenting that “the facts
mentioned above, ignored by Dr. Merriam, are common knowledge
to every inhabitant of this region” (Cockerell, 1898, p. 636). Mer-
riam did offer a reply to this letter, which acknowledged the
inherent and unavoidable fuzziness of life zone boundaries, offer-
ing this as a defense against using exceptions to the patterns he saw
to invalidate the whole system. Nevertheless, Cockerell’s key point
was a significant one: that the experiential knowledge of people
living in a placedeven those who were not credentialed scien-
tistsdcould not be fully captured by a simplified, reductionist
system of transcontinental life zones.
On the other hand, Merriam himself appealed to local and
regional on-the-ground experience in critiquing other geographical
distribution schemes, such as that of zoologist Joel A. Allen, whose
claims about the Pacific coast region Merriam believed were defi-
cient, “chiefly because he has never seen the country þ has only a
book-knowledge (and apparently a poor one at that) of the
fauna þ facts of distribution in that region.”6 Even if Merriam
traveled widely and quickly through many different places, he did
strongly believe in the value of experiencing those places himself,
as well as relying in part on the ground-level judgment on his field
staff who spent more in the field than he did. In reality, then,
Merriam’s vision of life zones was poised between the cosmopol-
itan and the experiential, rejecting schemes of classification, such
as Allen’s, which were not based on enough experience in the field,
but also (as Cockerell had pointed out) producing oversimplified
transcontinental knowledge that could not fully capture the reality
of experience on the ground in particular places, where even lay
people possessed insights missed by short-term visitors.
In fact, very little of the knowledge generated by ground-level
experience at the Biological Survey was acquired by Merriam
himself after the Death Valley Expeditiondand even that project
was directed in the field by Merriam for only part of the time. As the
Biological Survey grew in staff and funding, Merriam relied
increasingly on his field staff to reconcile the life zones with
particular places. Once the life zone system had been articulated
and refined in the 1890s, a more fixed division of labor became
established at the Biological Survey in which Merriam’s life zones
would serve as guiding conceptual frameworks, but their exact
6
Merriam to Brewster, 16 January 1893, Museum of Comparative Zoology, cited
in Sterling, 1974, p. 292.
6 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
boundaries and nuances would be settled in the field, by Merriam’s
subordinates. One of those field workers was Merritt Cary whose
biological surveys of Colorado (Cary, 1911) and Wyoming (Cary,
1917) applied Merriam’s life zone system in those two environ-
mentally diverse, rectangular states.
But the most important of these field workers was Vernon
Bailey, who become chief field naturalist of the Biological Survey-
dand Merriam’s brother-in-law, after Bailey married his sister,
Florencedand conducted detailed surveys that deployed the life
zone framework in Texas (Bailey, 1905), New Mexico (Bailey, 1913),
and North Dakota (Bailey, 1926). The work in New Mexico would
prove especially fruitful over the long term, as Bailey conducted
more detailed studies on mammals, while his wife Florence con-
ducted concurrent studies of the state’s birds, which included
Vernon’s “Map of Life Zones in New Mexico” (Bailey, 1931; F. M.
Bailey, 1928, pp. 6e7). In the meantime, both Baileys together had
mapped Merriam’s life zones on a smaller geographical scale in
Glacier National Park of Montana, based on a two-month trip in the
summer of 1917, which had been preceded much earlier by an 1895
solo visit by Vernon (Bailey & Bailey, 1918).
During the twentieth century, versions of Merriam’s “life zone”
framework continued to be used for a variety of purposes. In his
path-breaking studies on antsdto cite just one of many exam-
plesdWilliam Morton Wheeler (1917) used the life zone concept in
his studies across western North America. Overall, the life zones
have tended to be most closely followed in the specific places
where Merriam’s framework is well suited, such as the San Fran-
cisco Mountains (Phillips, House, & Phillips, 1989). Elsewhere, the
fidelity to Merriam’s framework has tended to decrease with dis-
tance from the Southwest. For an interesting intermediate case,
consider Coloradodoverlapping at the Four Corners with the
Desert Southwest region, but extending across the southern Rocky
Mountains and onto the Great Plainsdwhere the early reservations
articulated by Cockerell in the late 1890s continued to be echoed
throughout the twentieth century. Yet even Cockerell (1927, p. 142)
would come to adopt a set of life zones that was based largely on
Merriam’s system, even going so far as to directly cite Cary’s work at
the Biological Survey as his main authority, when writing up a
synopsis of Colorado’s natural history for a wider audience. Cock-
erell’s slightly modified version of Merriam’s life zones proved
enduring. In his textbook history of Colorado, for instance, LeRoy R.
Hafen (1970, p. 18) explicitly based his overview of “Life Zones” on
Cockerell’s work, which included Merriam’s zones adapted for
Colorado: Arctic-Alpine, Hudsonian, Canadian, Transition (or “Col-
oradian”), and Upper Austral.
At the same time, other delineations of life zones in Colorado
continued to explicitly draw upon Merriam’s work, even through
the 1990s. For example, in his introduction to a popular book on the
distinctive natural places of Colorado, Thomas P. Huber (1993, pp.
20, 22, 27). affirmed the value of “vertical zonation” as a conceptual
framework, tracing it back to Humboldt and Merriam. Although
criticizing Merriam’s emphasis on “temperature only,” as well as
different names for most of the life zonesde.g., Plains, Foothills,
Montane, SubalpinedHuber did incorporate an “Upper Sonoran”
zone too. Unlike the other zones, which appeared in an elevation
sequence, the Upper Sonoran was restricted “the far west and
southwest of the state, where precipitation is low and semidesert
conditions exist,” and overlapped both the plains and foothills
zones in elevation. Notably, however, in a table listing the “eco-
systems” of Colorado, with the life zone(s) where they can be found,
several ecosystemsdSemidesert Shrublands, Sagebrush Shrub-
lands, Mountain Shrubland, and Piñon Pine/Juniper Wood-
landdwere listed both as present in the Upper Sonoran and one or
more of the other zones. Thus, even before we probe the question of
how the knowledge of “experience” was only imperfectly captured
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
in science with transcontinental ambitions, we can already see that
the knowledge attenuated across geographical spaces with
increasing distance, thus requiring adaptation to local experience.
4. Bailey as field man
Having traced a brief history of Merriam’s life zone concept,
including its spread, limitations, and adaptation by many other
thinkers, we can now examine how experience of the environment
changed when moving from the local to a transcontinental scale. To
make the case for the partiality and incompleteness of producing
knowledge from experience as such larger scales, it seems appro-
priate to choose the most promising example, in which the bridging
of the rift between experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge was
the most successful. If the limitations are evident even in such a
promising case, then they should be at least as much, in not more,
constraining for scientists without deep experience in the field,
whose failure to integrate experiential knowledge into their science
is more probable. Among the U.S. Biological Survey travelers who
mapped Merriam’s life zones across the continent, the most
compelling example is Vernon Bailey, the chief field naturalist who
was active from the late nineteenth century into the first third of
the twentieth century. Indeed, Bailey may be one of the most
promising candidates across the all the field sciences during the
period, due to his deep and geographically extensive field experi-
ence, alongside his active involvement in the world of cosmopol-
itan science and publication.
Bailey’s unusual capabilities were recognized by many who
wrote about him. An obituary in Nature Magazine, likely written by
a Biological Survey colleague, stated that Bailey had been “best
known as a mammologist, but he was also a practiced ornithologist
of the outdoor type, and had a field knowledge of the plants of the
country that many a botanist might well envy” (Preble, 1942).
Similarly, a profile of Bailey by Alma Chesnut (1929, p. 232), written
over a decade earlier while Bailey was still alive, claimed that he
“had realized that the proper study of birds and mammals required
that one be familiar with the plants on which they feed,” so that,
over time, Bailey had become “almost as adept at identifying the
different trees, shrubs, and grasses.” Bailey first acquired robust
experiential knowledge of nature during his childhood on a Min-
nesota farm. “At that time,” he later recalled, “no naturalist had ever
come my way.” With “few books,” Bailey’s “sources of information
and interest were the birds and mammals, reptiles, fish, and
plants,” that surrounded him, along with his “father and older
brother, [who] like most of the pioneers of that borderland, were
hunters and trappers as well as farmers and knew in a general way
much about the game and fur-bearing mammals, the birds, fishes,
and trees.” Bailey went further, since he “was ambitious to know
them all, even the small birds and tiniest shrews” (Bailey, 1935, p.
102; Kohler, 2008). While Bailey’s eclectic background and inter-
disciplinary reach were not unique in this period, he was arguably
one of the more striking examples of this important social category
of field naturalists before greater specialization.
As he matured into adulthood, Bailey extended his local
knowledge from childhood experience in Minnesota into a trans-
continental knowledge of nature, especially of the western United
States. He knew how to identify not just mammals, but also plant
life, birds, amphibians, as well as “what are their habits” (Chesnut,
1929, p. 232). This “unsurpassed” knowledge was based on his
astonishing travel record, which gave him recurring field experi-
ence of the environment across many parts of the continent. “There
have been few years, during the past five decades,” wrote one
colleague, “that did not find him traveling, by some method,
through desert, forest, mountain trail, or river valley.” This enabled
him to integrate his cosmopolitan scientific knowledge with his
 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
knowledge from such extensive field experience, and he thought
Bailey’s “memory of places visited was the most exact that I have
ever known.” By combining his robust field experience with a
strong aptitude for remembering different places, Bailey “added to
a genius akin to that of the Indian for memory of topographic de-
tails the broad geographic viewpoint of the cultivated scholar”
(Preble, 1942, p. 329).7 This telling “juxtaposition of American In-
dian topographic knowledge with the wider perspective of the
‘cultivated scholar’” helps establish a strong case for bridging of the
epistemic rift, since it “neatly conveys the combination of experi-
ential and cosmopolitan knowledgedover a wide geographical
areadthat so distinguished exceptional field survey scientists such
as Bailey” (Vetter, 2016, p. 156).
Bodily experience has been important throughout the history of
science (Lawrence & Shapin, 1998), but survey naturalists like
Bailey experienced the natural world in ways that differed from
scientists in laboratories, museums, or offices. One of the most
obvious ways was in the knowledge they gained through direct
food provisioning and subsistence while in the field. To supplement
the food supplies they brought along, field parties fished and
hunted, and these wild foods were not only more pleasurable than
canned and preserved foods, but they provided a way to experience
the natural world of each place through direct sustenance. For his
part, Bailey remembered such delicacies as “roast antelope ribs,”
river salmon, Texas catfish, turkeys, venison, and “fried blue
grouse” (Bailey, 1938). In addition to the knowledge of local flavors
and textures acquired through eating, the experience of hunting
and fishing itself provided experiential knowledge. Although many
field scientists brought along hired assistants who did much of the
hunting and fishingdfrom whom they surely learned at least some
experiential knowledge around campfiresdit was not uncommon
for all members of a field party, including its scientific leader, to
participate in such activities. When Bailey traveled in larger groups,
he was certainly one of them, and often he traveled in alone or in
small parties, where hunting, fishing, and cooking were all part of
the experience.
The boundary line between scientific practice and food pro-
curement could be blurred, since the same creatures could be ob-
jects of knowledge production and sustenance. The pocket gopher
was one animal that Bailey studied closely across North America,
writing entire scientific publications on it, but they provided “a
palatable meal in the mountains when other food is not available,”
he thought. “Two or three gophers broiled over the coals of the
camp fire furnish a fairly substantial and palatable meal, especially
if accompanied by a stew of wild onions and bulbs of the camas.” He
judged pocket gopher meat to be “rather dark and fine-grained,
tender, and in flavor not unlike that of the squirrel.” Furthermore,
he noted that the meat could acquire the taste of the local plants
the pocket gopher had been consuming, such as those he found
“rather strongly flavored with wild onions” (Bailey, 1915, p. 13). In
Texas, he imagined “roast prairie dog” gaining popularity, as one
possible way to control their numbers. “Properly prepared and
cooked,” he thought of them as “an epicurean dish” and “a delicacy”
(Bailey, 1905, p. 92). It is notable, however, that these observations
were incredibly rare in scientific publications, and we are left with
only the most general of conclusions, rarely specific to place, based
on the experiential knowledge of animals consumed in the field.
7
For Bailey’s own acknowledgment of the value of extending observations across
space and time, including seasonal variation, see Bailey, 1920b. The striking analogy
here to American Indian knowledge opens up the important question of how much
field scientists appropriated knowledge from American Indians during their
transcontinental field work, which cannot be addressed more fully here due to
space limitations, but see Vetter, 2016, pp. 32e33, 188, 206e207, 221e223, 247e
248.
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
7
More broadly, despite the impressive ground-level experiential
knowledge that long-time field naturalists such as Bailey acquired,
the limitations to the local specificity of those experiences were
driven by the practicalities and logistics of field work. Even for
those who built their careers in the field like Baileyd“field men,”
we might call themdthere were two very different patterns of
movement that shaped the development of experiential knowledge
in the field. For subordinate survey field partiesdincluding Bailey
during his first few years with the Survey, and occasionally there-
after for special state surveys in New Mexico, Texas, North Dakota,
and elsewheredthe predominant pattern was movement along a
careful and methodical path for several months or an entire field
season. The other pattern, for supervisory field naturalists such as
Bailey as the personnel of the Survey expanded, was to move
rapidly across the continent, visiting one field party after another to
check up on and assist them in their work. In either case, however,
the tradeoff was unavoidable between visiting more places and
seeing them long enough to acquire deeper place-based
knowledge.
5. The problem of seasonality
For field naturalists like Bailey, whether they were intensively
studying a smaller area for several months or moving quickly from
place to place, their lack of long-term residence in a single place
meant that they could not experience nature throughout all the
seasons of the year. Indeed, a recognition of the seasonality of field
science is embedded within the term “field season,” which was
typically limited to the summer (or late spring) to early fall, except
in the warmest climates and the lowest elevations. But environ-
ments change over time, not just due to long-term, secular trends,
but through cyclical patterns, and the experiential knowledge of
places throughout the year was difficult to obtain when selectively
traveling there mainly during certain times of the year.
In order to extend their knowledge to the off season, travelers
could occasionally prolong their travels. On his first collecting
expedition for Merriam in 1887, a young Bailey found himself in the
Black Hills of South Dakota in October, when his mentor warned
him that while some creatures might be “‘denned up’ for the
winter,” others would be leaving tracks in the snow, thus making
them easier to locate.8 On Bailey’s initial field trip, Merriam realized
that the young man did not yet have deep experiential knowledge
of the places through which he was traveling. Nevertheless, Mer-
riam was already urging him to think about the special opportu-
nities and environmental changes outside of the usual field season.
Throughout his career, Bailey did occasionally take opportunities to
collect and observe at other times of the year. For example, he
remained in North Dakota into the late fall of 1919 so that he could
witness the mice “storage season”: he found not only the mice
themselves underground but also a “small cache of beans and ar-
tichokes” (Bailey, 1920a, p. 71). However, not only were these ex-
periences atypical, but they most often tended to occur close to the
regular field season, such as in the mid to late fall. Unlike local
residents who had the opportunity to develop experiential
knowledge all year round, visiting field scientists who crossed
continents were more limited in what they could do.
One rare collecting trip for Bailey that was completely out of
season was his 1888-89 journey from Utah to Arizona, which pre-
ceded his rendezvous with Merriam for the landmark field study of
the San Francisco Mountains and surrounding areas in 1889, which
played such a key role in the development of the life zone concept.
8
C. Hart Merriam to Vernon Bailey, 18 October 1887, Vernon Bailey Papers, #554,
American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie [hereafter VBP].
8 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
During that winter trip, Bailey was at first supposed to move north
into Idaho, a state that he, Merriam, and three other men would
explore more in 1891, due to Merriam’s belief that it was imperative
to learn more about its understudied animal life and that it was
crucial for mapping his transcontinental life zones. But the antici-
pated winter conditions for field work made them rethink that
plan, and instead Bailey was directed south into the warmer climate
of Arizona.9 Still, the environment around one of his key field bases,
at Kanab in southern Utah, was not exactly balmy in the winter.
Merriam thought he might find “southern birds wintering in suit-
able places in the canon,” but this was an educated guess rather
than a judgment shaped by close personal experience of the re-
gion.10 Here again, Merriam was attempting to convey his modest
firsthand knowledge of the West to Bailey, but without as deep of
place-based understanding as Bailey would eventually acquire. The
canyonlands of southern Utah were challenging places to work in
the winter, both for everyday field life and work and for finding the
animals Bailey was looking for. In these early field trips, Bailey was
learning how to live and work in the diverse environmental con-
ditions across the continent. Even after he had several decades of
travel, however, his experiences remained mostly seasonal and
selective.
Thus, while the field survey was a powerful tool for producing
environmental knowledge at larger scaledacross continents, and
eventually the entire globedthat drew attention to broad patterns
in nature, it was inherently limited in how much it could integrate
experiences across all seasons. Local amateurs could sometimes
cite this problem when contending that their own knowledge
practices were superior to those of visitors. One of the sharpest
critics was North Dakota’s Joel Lunell (1915, pp. 155e156), who
argued against even state-level survey scientists. Most “rare plants”
would “remain undiscovered,” he thought, since a “place needing
weekly visits for years can not reveal its secrets on the very day
when the surveyor scans it.” He complained that “a majority of the
700 undiscovered plants would remain hidden for 100 years to the
botanist-surveyor!” Excoriating the “vital defects of plant surveys”
a few years later (Lunell, 1919, p. 29), declared his pleasure at the
abolition of state-level surveys in his state. Scoffing at the “few
seconds or minutes spent on each different square yard” by a
visiting survey scientist, “perhaps never to be visited again,” he
instead called for “sensible, quicker and less expensive methods for
exploring the flora.” Such local dissent may have been rare, espe-
cially when expressed so caustically in published form, but the
limitations of time and seasonality were certainly real. Even when
field naturalists were as intensely engaged for so long as Bailey,
“much of the experiential knowledge of place over time could not be
fully captured by itinerant survey collectors and observers” (Vetter,
2016, p. 161).
6. Local collaborators
When they were in the field, however, even if their own travels
were often restricted to summer and early fall in the regions such as
the interior West, Bailey and his colleagues at the Biological Survey
tried to build connections with local people. Such collaborators
typically had more experience in the environments they were
passing through, so that they could provide knowledge about
where to look for plants and animals of interest, as well as their
habits and peculiarities. Some survey scientists even hired local
guides to show them around. They also cultivated networks of lay
people and amateur naturalists who could collect and observe in
9 13
Norman J. Colman to Vernon Bailey, 1 November 1888, VBP.
10
C. Hart Merriam to Vernon Bailey, 17 December 1888, VBP.
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
places where they could not be all year round, or even places they
had never visited.11 When he undertook a project to map the
geographical distribution of prairie ground squirrels, also known as
sphermophiles, across North America, Bailey mapped information
obtained through two widely-circulated solicitations from the
agency, focusing especially on “positive localities” from which
physical specimens had been received, but also marking places
where “a multitude of reports of occurrence cover the ground,”
using these as a guide for future collecting endeavors.12 By leaving
open some doubt about places with only observational evidence
from collaborators, rather than specimens, Bailey was implicitly
acknowledging the social heterogeneity of the agency’s lay and
amateur collecting network, which acted as a significant limitation
on aggregating local experiences into verified knowledge at larger
scale. Merriam, too, questioned some knowledge provided by local
collaborators, such as when he inquired further “about the reli-
ability” of man who had sent a ringtail cat specimen from near Blue
Springs, Missouri to the naturalist L. L. Dyche at the University of
Kansas, given that the species had not been found closer than
western Texas.13
Given the sheer number of geographically distributed collabo-
rators who shared information and specimens based on their local
experiences, it was not always feasible to evaluate the credibility of
each individual separately. As historians and sociologists of such
disparate scientific disciplines as ornithology and statistics have
shown, producing credible knowledge from large numbers of par-
ticipants has posed distinctive challenges (Charvolin, 2004; Didier,
2011). In the case of Bailey’s 1893 report on the geographical dis-
tribution of spermophiles for the U.S. Biological Survey, “hundreds
of letters” in response to a circular letter of inquiry sent in 1886 had
to be evaluated. The plausibility of the evidence itself led Bailey to
accept or reject it. While “many” letters included “matter of little
value or statements that were evidently incorrect, the greater
number were simple statements of fact that added much new and
original information to the previous knowledge of the habits and
distribution of North American mammals.” For the responses to
subsequent circulars, Bailey simply discarded those he regarded as
“doubtful records” (Bailey, 1893, pp. 11e12). Thus, not only was
much of the experiential knowledge possessed by the local col-
laborators likely omitted from the replies sent to the Biological
Survey, but even the limited information that made it through the
filter was further sifted on the grounds of its plausibility or
doubtfulness. In coordinating such a large network, nearly all of the
experiential knowledge from the places where the specimens were
collected was lost. Aggregation and standardization of data meant
that only a few very basic categories were retained, such as the
species identification and the spatial location where it was
collected. After all, the primary knowledge products of the Bio-
logical Survey were the geographical distribution maps of indi-
vidual species (or varieties) and the life zone maps that brought
together all of diversity of the living world on a single map, with
only a handful of categories.
When they were traveling in the field with survey parties, U.S.
Biological Survey naturalists also depended on local people for
crucial forms of help, and in this case there was more opportunity
for the incorporation of experiential knowledge. Even for local field
11
Scholarly work on amateur-professional relations in science is vast, but for two
good starting points that focus, respectively, on tensions in ornithology and
collaboration in astronomy, see Barrow, 1998; and McCray, 2008.
12
A more critical historical interpretation of Bailey’s dependence on networks of
lay people or amateurs to generate field evidence can be found in Nagy, 2014.
C. Hart Merriam to L. L. Dyche, 23 February 1904, L. L. Dyche Papers, Spencer
Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Box 2.
 J. Vetter / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018) 1e10
assistants, however, their experiential knowledge was often limited
to navigation and locating scientific objects of interest on the
landscape, as well as practical assistance. To be sure, there were
sometimes opportunities for field assistants or informal local
guides to contribute their knowledge based on their experience of a
particular place. Even Vernon Bailey, who would ultimately as the
Biological Survey’s chief field naturalist become better acquainted
through direct experience than perhaps anyone else with the
diverse environments across the continent, especially in the
American West, faced an acute need to seek local help during his
first field trip. While in the Nebraska Sandhills, unsure of where to
go, he received informal advice from a mail carrier, who served as
his informal guide.14 Such a fortuitous encounter jump-started his
collecting efforts through the man’s sharing of his experiential
knowledge of place. Other local guidance was provided in Chey-
enne, Wyoming, by a known government official, and in Nephi,
Utah, by a local informant recommended by colleague in the U.S.
Geological Survey.15
Such local informants were ubiquitous in the practice of the
Biological Survey, yet their contributions were most often limited to
the provision of intelligence on what species could be found and
where they could be found. Any further experiential knowledge
was rarely recorded or incorporated into the Biological Survey’s
reports. Nor is it easy to see how it could have been integrated with
the knowledge of geographical distribution and life zones that was
ultimately produced, given that such mappings and categories
aimed to reduce local variation in favor of a large-scale, patterned
transcontinental perspective.
7. Conclusion
Scaling up field work from the local to the continental scale,
which faces many of the same challenges as moving to global scale,
presented the U.S. Biological Survey and other field scientists
working during the railroad era with an opportunity to bridge the
epistemic rift between experiential knowledge of place and the
cosmopolitan knowledge of science. Such efforts even opened the
possibility for the transmission of experiential knowledge. Despite
its place-bound, and embodied characterdmuch like what other
scholars have labeled as “tacit knowledge,” although with at least
much emphasis on observation as on performancedsuch knowl-
edge could be scaled up to a certain extent through field practices
that involve deep immersion across transcontinental environ-
mental spaces.16 Moreover, given the chance for the a group of field
naturalists sharing a common conceptual framework, such as
Merriam’s life zones, to travel widely between places with
patterned similarities and differences, limited aspects of experi-
ential knowledge could travel with them and be incorporated into
the work of the Biological Survey.
However, despite the considerable achievements of the Sur-
veydespecially its long-time chief field naturalist, Vernon Bailey,
who had as much or more on-the-ground experience with
geographically distributed and diverse environments across North
America as anyone else diddthe possibility of integrating these
different forms of knowledge was ultimately partial and
14
Vernon Bailey to “Friends”, 10 June 1888, VBP.
15
C. Hart Merriam to Vernon Bailey, 1 August 1888, VBP; C. Hart Merriam to
Vernon Bailey, 6 November 1888, VBP.
16
For a similar argument about travel and circulation for experiential knowledge
across transoceanic, rather than transcontinental, spaces, but which advocates a
much stronger version of this assertiondcontending that such knowledge could
itself become cosmopolitandsee Gómez, 2017. While I acknowledge that possibility
here, I ultimately focus at least as much, if not more, on the limitations of this
process.
Please cite this article in press as: Vetter, J., Experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge: The transcontinental field practices of the U.S. Bureau of
Biological Survey, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.05.005
9
incomplete. Some experiences, such as knowing animals as a
source of food, were shared between field scientists and local
people, but such knowledge was almost always restricted to rare
sidebar comments rather than being central to the knowledge
production mission of the agency. Time also presented a major
constraint, which was evident in the seasonality of survey field
practice, but could just as well be seen in longer-term cycles of
change visible to those who live and work in a particular place over
a long period. Finally, the involvement of both lay network col-
laborators and field assistants to survey parties provided an op-
portunity for experiential knowledge to contribute to the practice
of science, but that influence was typically limited to finding lo-
cations for collecting and observing, and almost always the scien-
tific authority to interpret and understand local nature by
cosmopolitan field scientists overruled the knowledge of experi-
ence in scientific reports. If incorporating experiential knowledge
was circumscribed and limited at the continental scale, with an
unusually favorable set of Survey practices and uncommonly adept
field men such as Vernon Bailey, it has likely posed an even greater
challenge for global environments.
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