“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: so wrote Duchess, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford.John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th and 125th Anniversary Edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 676, line 20, in Molly Bawn, 1878). So, too, might we say today, at the 21st centuryʼs beginning, and not simply of beauty, or ugliness, or of justice or injustice, or of wisdom or folly, as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had it a generation before her, but of truth, even scientific truth. The 20th century has not been kind to many 19th-century notions, ideals, and practices. Among those it has treated the most harshly is that of objective, scientific truth. In Hungerfordʼs day, most educated people in the Western world spoke and acted as if truth was attainable. Positive truth was available to those trained in the special knowledge and methods of the professional expert. In Western Europe and North America, the educated classes regarded such special knowledge – expertise, that is – the natural and inevitable consequence of academic and scientific institutions there. And the professionalization of American science, thanks to the faculty of American private and public graduate universities in the half-century following 1870, set the intellectual and ideological horizons of science, scholarship, and the professions. The professional ideal crystallized, with its concomitant notions of the expert with special training and knowledge and a desire to serve the general public, not greedy commercial interests. Truth was not diluted. For the professionals and their client populations, it was absolute, unchanging, timeless. The professional scientist could verify it with his expert methods. He served the larger public with his commitments to objectivity, fairness, and special knowledge. Science occupied a special place. Its authority depended upon its meritorious character. As such, it was a hierarchical truth, and those who derived it were a natural and appropriate elite.On the rise of the professional ideal and of positivism, see Samuel P. Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890–1920 (1972; rept. New York: Athenaeum, 1959), passim. See also Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), esp. chs. 1–5; Alan I Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870–1890 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985), passim; and Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), passim, which discuss how these perspectives came into common public discourse in seemingly widely differing areas of science.