The history of science is a history of forgetting. It is the history of how scientific truth emerges from the murky cacophony of words and things that were once said and built, but are now silenced and buried. At the moment a regime of scientific truth coalesces, this cacophony is enveloped within a rational, ordered and yet arbitrary universal system. But we should pause to remember that the elements of this system were already present in the anarchy it replaced. For reasons of practicality, we are taught to forget the chaos which preceded contemporary knowledge. At the same time, those elements of wretched knowledge that we thought were finally repressed by truth continue to emerge over and over again. In 1999, for example, most of the sociologists and anthropologists in the United States and Canada received in the mail an edited version of a 300-page work purporting to prove the inferiority of blacks and Asians relative to whites. The book was by a tenured professor at a respected Canadian university and published by a reputable press associated with a major American university.

On the other hand, it is certainly true that many insightful critiques of the concept of race have already been produced. The best of these works carry on the tradition of examining race not as an essential aspect of bodies, but as a concept of power that is over determined by the ideology of everyday life.

By the end of the 1870s in Britain, scientific naturalism had coloured a plethora of popular and expert-led debates regarding the origins of the universe, the development of organic matter, the dissipation of energy and even the adoption of new mathematics in geometry and algebra. While the ‘gentlemen of science’ in natural philosophy and natural history, such as John Herschel, Charles Lyell and William Whewell, had worked to ensure a permanent place for God in the order of things, by maintaining that natural laws are not absolute though they are uniform, agnostics such as Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall worked to eliminate God from the story of cause-and-effect entirely. The question of uniformity in nature became a point of departure for a number of scientific and philosophical participants in the evolutionary debates that defined Victorian science in the 1860s and 1870s. William Kingdon Clifford played a significant role in those debates. As a mathematician, he developed unusual views with regards to the role of evolutionism in mathematical knowledge. Specifically, Clifford developed a philosophy of mathematics indebted to Herbert Spencer's understanding of the integration and differentiation of matter over generations of species.

Clifford as an Evolutionary Mathematician

As a graduate of Cambridge University's Tripos mathematical system, Clifford was embroiled in debates over the implications of the uniformity of nature from the outset of his academic career.

In 1824, Horace Smith, captivated by Giovanni Belzoni's recent exhibition of an Egyptian mummy, published an address that commanded it return to life to reveal both the secrets of her life and those of Ancient Egyptian culture:

Literally embodying the past, Egyptian mummies were and indeed still are compelling. They occupy a liminal world between the dead and the living that can both fascinate and unnerve. As Smith realized, they are full of paradox for they resist death by somehow seeming still very much alive. They ‘speak’ of mysticism and the exotic, yet at the same time remind us of the final fate we are all destined to achieve. The urge, however, to come face to face with an Egyptian mummy was never more desired than in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The 1820s saw an incredible rise in the acquisition of Egyptian mummies for souvenirs and as artefacts for collection and display. Treated more as commodities and historical specimens than as human remains, they were displayed, unwrapped, cut open and divested of their funerary goods, all in the name of knowledge.

On 17 December 1662, the philosophical gentlemen of the Royal Society of London had their minds on drink. Christopher Merret, the physician, presented his collected observations on how best to manage wine in storage; Robert Hooke, newly appointed as the Society's Curator of Experiments, described the products of distilling common water; and Sir Robert Moray, soldier turned courtier, announced that he was preparing a study of beer-brewing in his native Scotland, which he hoped could be extended to cover ‘all sorts of ale and beer’. Abraham Hill, a wealthy young man who devoted much of his time to Society administration, suggested that a Mr Philips could help with this project, and might then receive a Fellowship. No such man was elected, however, and it seems the project was never completed.

The advantages of wealth, social position and personal connections may have formed the springboard from which the scientific successes of the Darwins were launched, and in this respect they may have been fortunate, but the Darwins were not unique. Even within the confines of this narrative parallels to their lives can be found. Thus, Hales like Erasmus was free to pursue botany as a hobby in time left over from his secure, comfortable professional life. Thus, Dutrochet like Charles was able to lead the life of a wealthy country-house based gentleman scientist. Such stories were repeated many times over in the eighteenth and nineteenth century across Europe, and even men like Priestley and Ingen-Housz could point to some good fortune for they were able to find themselves wealthy patrons and protectors.

What was exceptional about the Darwins was that their wealth, social position and personal connections were assiduously nurtured (see Chapter 2), so that, as generations passed, Fortune was more and more generous in the gifts she bestowed upon her nurslings. What was unique about the Darwins was that different generations of one family contributed so much to the advance of one science. So, it is appropriate to ask, what were the scientific gifts that were passed between generations? How fortunate was Charles to have Erasmus as his grandfather and, in his turn, Francis to have sprung from Charles and Erasmus?

In earlier biographies of Erasmus and Charles, the men have been treated separately and their botany has taken only a small part; no biography has been written of Francis.

In 1825, the natural history collection of a young Frankfurt society, procured by donations and subscriptions alone, filled the visiting nature philosopher Lorenz Oken with awe. In less than a decade, the institution was to rank fifth among the natural history museums in Europe:

The Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature (Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft), Frankfurt's first institution for natural history, was founded on 22 November 1817 at the close of a major socio-political transformation.

Late Victorians were accustomed to seeing technical novelties not just as entertaining theatrical diversions but as laden with both promises of material luxury and threats of bodily harm. Those who read daily press reports of railway crashes, gas conflagrations and steam boiler explosions in the early 1880s were hardly surprised to discover that the electricity provided not only a novel kind of illumination but also a new and unpleasant form of accidental death. The case of electricity posed unusually complex concerns, however, and this was not just because it had been employed for decades in medical treatments of contested therapeutic efficacy, nor because it was employed from 1890 as a statutory if still controversial means of execution in New York State. There was something new and rather disturbing about letting the strange and powerful agency of electricity loose around the home: a hallowed space in which industrially-sourced gaslight had still not displaced the paraffin lamp or candle by the early 1880s, and the telephone was almost a complete stranger.

Behind the recurrent lay question ‘what is electricity?’ was householders’ demand to know the nature of the potent commodity that they were invited to risk bringing into the safety of the domestic sphere, notwithstanding evidence of its potentially fatal effects on unwary mortals.

This is a book about credibility. Its characters are the many researchers who, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tried to address beer-brewing in ways they called ‘theoretical’, ‘philosophical’ or ‘scientific’. It is easy to imagine why such approaches were not always taken seriously. We are used to thinking of scientific investigators performing systematic experiments, searching for universal explanations in nature and communicating their findings on paper, usually by open publication. The craft and trade of beer-brewing conjures up an opposing set of ideas: down-to-earth artisans, mistrustful of theorists and tinkering; local customs of production, fiercely guarded from outsiders; skills passed down to a chosen few apprentices by hands-on experience. Nevertheless, a credible and coherent enterprise of brewing science existed by around 1880, the work both of theorists from outside the brewery, and of established brewers with theories of their own.

Credibility, for all investigators, meant showing that their claims were not merely valid, but actively useful to some relevant audience.

In the 1869 preface to a Book of Wonderful Characters; Memoirs and Anecdotes of Remarkable and Eccentric Persons in All Ages and Countries, an unnamed editor made two claims for the significance of the work. First, the biographies of individuals ‘possessing an eccentricity of character’ had, he wrote, ‘been in all times eagerly sought after by the curious inquirer into human nature’. Eccentricity was a perennially fascinating subject. Second, though, ‘a great change … in the manners and customs of the people of England’ had in recent years rendered the subject of eccentricity yet more acutely interesting: ‘We have nearly lost all, and are daily losing what little remains of, our individuality’, he wrote with alarm; ‘all people and all places seem now to be alike’. This mid-Victorian writer was not alone in fearing himself to be living in an age of decline, as far as eccentricity was concerned. A decade previously, in what is now probably the most frequently cited nineteenth-century dictum on eccentricity, the philosopher John Stuart Mill warned:

Mill's primary concern in his treatise On Liberty (1859) was the extent to which power could rightly be exerted over members of a civilized society; the demise of eccentricity, in his opinion, was a symptom of the tyranny of public opinion being allowed to interfere unjustifiably with the liberty of individuals. The editor of the Book of Wonderful Characters, taking a different angle, blamed the material fruits of the modern industrial age: the railways, the steam press, technologies of mass production.