For a few months after the transit, newspapers and journals regularly followed updates from the expeditions. Airy apparently sent updates to the press; one list of places to which transit of Venus information should be sent included, among government offices and national observatories, the following: Reuters’ office, the Times, the Daily News, the Standard, the Daily Telegraph, the Athenaeum, Nature, the Smithsonian Institute, the Manchester Courier, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Echo and the Globe. But, in general, press coverage of the enterprise did not last long after the day of the transit. There were a few last attempts to draw some public reaction by reporting spectacular failures, such as a report in the Daily News from mid-January 1875. The supposed disaster caused by the loss of observations in New Zealand and Kerguelen was contrasted with the supposed successes of Lord Lindsay's operation, especially his choice of the ‘almost perfect, theoretically’ long-focus photographic method, which, as the paper suggested, Airy declined out of pride to adopt:

Proctor had written in the Daily News before and he may well have been the author of this piece; the concluding jab at Airy's alleged immunity is characteristic of his style. Either way, it was far too early to make any statements about the relative successes of each country, or about how the British government would react to any failures. While it was true that the Americans had had slightly better luck with the weather, other factors would be much more important in deciding the fate of the research programmes.

This book reconstructs some of the assumptions shared by a group of London life researchers in the thirty-eight years before Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. It sets out to understand some of the questions that intrigued members of this community, looks at the research from their perspective and depicts their various theories and hypotheses as answers to these questions. In so doing it shows them to be part of a larger interlocking system of beliefs. Some are forgotten; others still live on.

This work can thus be seen as a history of a pre-Darwinian mentality in the life sciences. It does differ from earlier studies of mentalities because of its narrow range and focus – covering under forty years, looking only at those in a single city, dealing mainly with those who studied invertebrates. Yet Styles of Reasoning can be seen as a history of a mentality for other reasons. It studies collective and often unarticulated beliefs that formed a backdrop for the individual projects of London life researchers. It investigates many ordinary people too – not peasants or heterodox millers but instead now-forgotten life researchers who wrote textbooks, published in medical journals or taught comparative anatomy and physiology to medical students. These people shared assumptions and similar practices that formed an underlying context; a framework giving explicit theories and definitions their meaning and appeal. Finally, this book shows how many of these shared beliefs often reinforced one another, together forming a coherent system. If certain points were accepted, then one was constrained – though not forced – to accept other points.

These shared presuppositions can be explicated still further, using work from history and philosophy of science: instead of calling them mentalities they are called styles of reasoning. Styles of reasoning are here defined as self-reinforcing beliefs about what counted as good research. More durable than Kuhnian paradigms, they were rules about how one reasoned correctly, tacit positions that channelled researchers into deeming certain kinds of evidence to be more relevant to their investigations.

During his third expedition to South America, in 1820, the Roman Catholic naturalist Charles Waterton found himself in a rather awkward situation. An avid collector and taxidermist, Waterton had travelled 540 km through the ‘wilds of Guiana’ with his entourage to obtain a perfect cayman specimen for the museum at his country house back in Yorkshire. Now, faced with the furious beast stuck fast to the end of a rope – it had swallowed a baited hook cast into the Essequibo river – Waterton was at a loss. His helpers were divided: some wanted to kill it with arrows, whilst others preferred to shoot it. Either would have been disastrous. Waterton wanted a perfect specimen, not a mutilated one, and so there was only one thing for it: it had to be taken alive. Grabbing a canoe mast for protection, Waterton crouched down by the bank of the river, holding the mast like a bayonet, and ordered the men to haul the unhappy reptile out of the water. As soon as it was landed, he leapt fearlessly onto its back, turning half round as he vaulted, and grabbed hold of its forelegs, twisting them behind its back to serve as a bridle as the men continued to drag the pair further inland to safety. ‘It was the first and last time I was ever on a cayman's back’, Waterton later explained. ‘Should it be asked, how I managed to keep my seat, I would answer, – I hunted some years with Lord Darlington's fox hounds’. In 1825, Waterton published an account of this and many other adventures as Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820 & 1824. Before long, the cayman anecdote had been reprinted in virtually all the newspapers, and the caricature shown in Figure I.1 could be seen in print shop windows across Britain. People flocked from all around to the home of the celebrated naturalist to view his collection of specimens, the unfortunate cayman amongst them.

In 1875 David Page, geologist and enthusiast for intellectual culture, published a pamphlet-length plea for an increase in the number of field clubs and science associations. In his petition Page deployed the well-worn themes that had marked countless calls made in Victorian towns entreating local publics to participate in scientific pursuits. Botany, geology and meteorology among other subjects were recommended to Page's readers as physically and mentally invigorating pastimes. For Page, natural history, more than other forms of intellectual culture, offered a stimulating distraction from the debilitating effects of routine urban existence. Page was careful to point out the dangers of narrow scientific professionalism, a condition incompatible with ‘the duties of brotherly sympathy, honest manliness, and good citizenship, which render life sweet and society enjoyable’. Recreative science, on the other hand, united the pursuit of general happiness and individual intelligence and provided a hopeful way forward amidst signs of social decay.

Page's estimation of the social benefits of a widespread and collective interest in natural science was shared by the Revd Charles Kingsley. In a preface to a series of lectures on ‘town geology’ first published in 1872 Kingsley presented the political advantages associated with diffusing a scientific spirit among Britain's urban classes. The ‘dream’ that Kingsley offered to his readers was of a ‘true working aristocracy’ that functioned according to the habits of mind acquired through active participation in scientific work. The patient study of town geology (or any other branch of natural history) would supply the basis for the freedom, equality and brotherhood, which state government could not by itself provide. As ‘a student of society and history’ Kingsley urged his readers to heed the prognosis – inductively derived – that ‘power will pass more and more, if all goes healthily and well, into the hands of scientific men’.

The testimonies of Page and Kingsley typify a pervasive rhetoric attached to attempts at enlarging participation in scientific pursuits.

Introduction

Late seventeenth-century Britain was one of the least wooded countries in Europe. In broad terms woodland had fallen to less than 5 per cent of the land area compared to the 10 per cent estimated to have existed at the time of Domesday. Moreover, compared to many European counties, the number of trees that could be classed as native to Britain was very low with less than thirty broadleaved species and as few as five evergreens. The geography of tree species resulted from a complicated mixture of environmental conditions and past human activities. Although of small acreage, the woods found in different parts of the country varied considerably: intensively managed oak coppice grown for tannin in Cornwall and Devon; strips of coppiced alder along brooks and rivers in the Midlands; pollarded oaks and ashes and stripped elms found in many hedgerows; while significant areas of native Scots pine were only to be found in Scotland. Partly as a consequence of the small area of woodland, Britain was largely dependent on imported rather than home-produced timber and wood products. In addition, there was very little publicly owned forest apart from some small remnants of Crown forests, such as parts of the Forest of Dean and the New Forest.

Unlike the faunas discussed in the previous chapter, county and national floras were commonplace by the nineteenth century. Cornwall's botanists therefore operated in quite a different intellectual economy to their zoological counterparts. The likes of James Edward Smith, James Sowerby, Dawson Turner, William and Joseph Hooker, and Hewett Cottrell Watson advanced botanical beyond zoological science such that Charles Darwin could claim in 1856 that ‘Botany has been followed in so much more a philosophical spirit than Zoology’. As a result provincial botanists were much more heavily regulated than their zoological counterparts and operated with much less latitude and in a much more crowded field. In the same year that Jonathan Couch was laying out his zoological prospectus to the RIC, the Worcestershire naturalist Edwin Lees was able to state, without defence or justification, that the ‘utility of local floras is indispensable, not merely as a companion to the wandering Botanist, but as data for the Scientific generaliser’. Whilst Lees was willing to admit that works such as his own on the Malvern Hills had a range of well-defined roles, he was quick to note the lack of such a study in his chosen area of research: ‘it is almost marvellous that, visited as the Malvern Hills are from all parts of the world, no complete account of their vegetable productions has ever yet been published’. This was a common refrain in regional or local floras of the period: a simultaneous acknowledgement of the author's limited role in an already crowded philosophical field and a justification of their presence on the basis of a blank area on the nation's botanical map.

This chapter examines the work of Cornish botanists across the course of the nineteenth century and pays particular attention to several county botanical projects and their chief organizers: Elizabeth Warren and John Ralfs. It will be shown that Warren, Ralfs and others were embedded in national botanical networks and as a result were closely regulated by those networks’ fine-grained social and intellectual conventions.