Through their membership in scientific societies, eighteenth-centuryAmerican gentlemen served as gatekeepers of participation in scientific inquriy. Early American scientific societies excluded poor to middling white men, Indians, blacks and women, yet these outsiders continued topractice
science outside of formal organizations. These excluded groups also participated in the societies assources ofknowledge and subjects of inquiry, making them vital to the work of organizations like the American PhilosophcialSociety and the American Academy of Artsand Science.s1n their discourses on these outsider groups, the societies used scientific reasoning to mark blacks, Indians, the lower classes and women as inferiors. Although cognitively-dissonant, the scientific elite were desirous of the knowledge of those they felt beneath them, particularly when it originated from
black and Indian communities, who were depicted as"primitive" or "savage." These gentleman scientists often took knowledge from outsider groups without giving them credit for their ideas. By being the first to publish, the white men of the societies gained authorship and authority over the
knowledge developed by women, Indians, blacks and the lower sorts. Throughtheir efforts to colonize knowledge on the American continent, elite men created
