The Sociable Sciences reconstructs the social world of naturalists who traveled to or within Chile in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Patience Schell superbly tells a chronological narrative using overlapping biographies of the preeminent figures involved in the often thrilling and wonder-filled enterprise of natural history fieldwork. She situates these naturalists in the historiography of science and of friendships. Schell typifies the excellence in scholarship on creole science and natural history in the making that will interest social historians, historians of science, and scholars of the transnational nineteenth century.