This circular informs Dr. John Wakefield Francis of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York’s next meeting. The Society had been founded on January 13, 1814.

 

The Society published its first Transactions the year after in 1815, but volume two appeared after a wait of a decade in 1825. That volume was quite slender in comparison to its predecessor, indicating that by that time the Society was already in decline. The decline has been attributed to two causes: firstly, the Society had devoted more time to securing honorary memberships in the Society than to the promotion of science itself. Secondly, just three years after the Society had been founded, it found a rival in the Lyceum of Natural History of New York (which was formed in 1817), and later became the New York Academy of Sciences). This rival proved to be more vigorous than the Society itself and followed the more modern approach of specializing in an area (in their case, natural history), rather than the older generalist model of the Enlightenment, which had been followed by the Society. After the formation of the Lyceum of Natural History, the Society went into a protracted decline. By the 1830s the Society had trouble reaching quorum for its meetings, the last of which is recorded to have occurred on November 28, 1834.