Science on the Texas Frontier

Edward O. Wilson has described Dr Gideon Lincecum as "an American original, expansive, passionate, and prone to make science out of what he could see with his own eyes. His life illuminates an important era, and mood, in Texas history, and he ranks as one of America's major pioneering naturalists". A most remarkable man who found himself ill at ease in "polite and fashionable society", Lincecum preferred to keep company with "kindred forms, my brother emmets and my sister worms", observing and studying nature on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier. Gathered together here for the first time are selections from Lincecum's letters and other scientific writings, placed in context and ordered to provide a narrative account of this frontier naturalist's twenty-five-year investigation of Texas fauna, flora, landscape, and weather. From the mysterious qualities of native plants, both medicinal and poisonous, to the fearsome rapidity of the blue norther, turning summer to winter along the plains in a frigid instant, Gideon recorded what he saw and experienced in the wilds of the Texas frontier. Science on the Texas Frontier represents a significant contribution to the history of science in America during the middle nineteenth century and will be of great interest to natural historians and scientists, conservationists and environmentalists, as well as lovers of Texana and general readers fascinated with Western and scientific history.