The would-be communicator of brewery knowledge could operate by publication, by private instruction or by selective combination of the two. Each approach carried both opportunities and dangers for the promoter's credibility. Publication, as illustrated by the case of Michael Combrune in chapter 2, could raise suspicions that what was on offer was dilettante conjecture, not valuable enough to withhold. Too much privacy, on the other hand, left clients with little means to judge the instructor's reputation – if, indeed, he even came to their attention in the first place. Though some instructors wrote personally to every significant brewer they could identify, it was far easier to promote their names by appearing in booksellers' lists and the monthly reviewing press.

By the mid-twentieth century the term arboretum was relatively commonplace. It referred to a place where collections of trees were grown and displayed systematically, sometimes planted according to botanical taxonomies, labelled and catalogued. For some, such as Evelyn Waugh, arboretums had become hackneyed; the quotation above describes an arboretum in the garden of a ‘large, requisitioned villa in a still desolate area of Essex’, in 1943. Here the term is consciously pompous and affected, describing the remnant of a small tree collection in the garden of a modest house; but as we have seen, in the nineteenth century arboretums were perceived as innovative and exciting places.

This study has explored the development of arboretums in the period, arguing that there was a close relationship between botany and arboriculture and that the latter encouraged the adoption of the natural system in Britain. It has examined the emergence of tree collections intended to provide botanical education including botanical gardens, private estates and public sites where collections were displayed.

Introduction

Since the time of Nehruvian histories, there has been recognition of the significance of Orientalist scholarship with respect to tracing the development of science in India. Or, to put it another way, the Orientalists have been seen as setting the template for the historiography of science in India. In the period between 1784 and c. 1830, Europeans in India demonstrated a sustained engagement with Indian astronomy. There was a concern with researching the past in order to understand how it related to the present, and astronomy was central to this endeavour. In order to trace these scholarly trajectories, the journals of the learned societies, especially that of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, are the most valuable source. Indeed, the Asiatick Researches contained numerous articles on astronomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and so must be taken as a point of entry for elucidating the Orientalist engagement with Indian astronomy in that period. Though some of these perspectives on astronomy are relatively well known, the existing historical literature has understated the expanse of the imagination involved in the Orientalist researching of the past. Moreover, there is a need to recognize the different types of engagement with astronomy that were considered possible. Orientalists not only demonstrated a historically-situated philosophical engagement with Indian astronomy, using astronomy to understand India's scientific heritage and how it related to that of Europe, but also considered the possibility of a practical engagement, exploring the scope for learning from Indian astronomers and their paradigms.

During his Presidential Address to the PNHAS in 1889, the Rev. Lach-Syzrma expressed his feelings on the value of fieldwork:

Lach-Syzrma's reference to ‘healthy recreation’ aside, his speech could just as easily have been referring to a whole range of activities and facilities provided by the Society, such as evening conversaziones, museum displays and more occasional events such as exhibitions and bazaars. The PNHAS was not unique in doing so; all of the other scientific societies in Cornwall provided at least some of these facilities for their members. In fact, these activities were common across Britain and helped to constitute what Fyfe and Lightman have referred to as a ‘cultural marketplace’ – the diverse ‘sites, products and experiences’ that were on offer to the Victorian scientific consumer. The chapter is organized around these diverse sites, products and experiences. It begins with a discussion of the significance of a permanent home for local science, and goes on to examine the museum, the conversazione, the exhibition and the fieldsite in turn, both in general context and in relation to the practice of Cornish science.

Despite a vogue for fieldclubs in Victorian Britain, the majority of scientific societies in Britain placed great weight on having their own property. According to Allen, ‘status was founded on property – and a propertyless body, it was assumed, must be no less contemptible and ineffective than a propertyless man or woman’. It is for these reasons that peripatetic natural history organizations like the Berwickshire Club were in the exception (even if, given the lack of rent, they tended to do rather better financially than their building-bound contemporaries) and why so many other amateur scientific societies chose to locate their activities within designated spaces and govern their activities along heavily prescribed calendars and itineraries.

Our understanding of the range of exhibition spaces for Victorian popular science, and the correspondingly diverse experiences they provided for audiences, has undergone significant modification over the last ten years. Whilst metropolitan establishments such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution, Egyptian Hall, Wyld's Great Globe and Royal Adelaide Gallery probably remain the best-known known examples of institutions providing a potent mixture of instruction, amusement and spectacle, a wealth of recent scholarship has demonstrated that there was also an increasing variety of alternative exhibition spaces that have been for too long in the shadow of these large and iconic London establishments. A trip to the Polytechnic or Egyptian Hall might well form part of the itinerary of a visitor to London; for most though, such trips were the exception rather than the rule. Two key research trends have driven this emergence of a more nuanced picture of Victorian popular science. The first is a move away from studies of the metropolis towards an exploration of the provision of lectures, demonstrations, classes and exhibitions in British provincial towns and cities. For inhabitants of towns and cities beyond London (and potentially for many Londoners as well), a lecture at the local mechanics' institute, a magic lantern show of natural history given as a Sunday school treat, the hullabaloo of a travelling menagerie arriving in the marketplace, or a freak show at the annual fair were more likely to have constituted their experiences of popular science.

In the early afternoon of 12 May 1905, an illustrious gathering occupied the Hall of Reptiles of the British Museum (Natural History). The occasion was the unveiling of a cast of the North American sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii (or carnegiei, as incorrectly reported in most media), a gift of the Scottish-born American steel baron Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) to the institution, by way of King Edward VII. For Carnegie, it was a moment of triumph for himself, for his charity campaigns, and for American drive and entrepreneurship. And maybe for that reason, some of the parties present regarded the gift with mixed feelings. Indeed, it was placed in the Gallery of Reptiles rather than the Gallery of Palaeontology because, as Museum Director E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929) did not forget to point out, that was already full of British dinosaurs. Lord Avebury, who accepted Carnegie's gift on behalf of the museum's trustees, was also somewhat condescending:

Conversely, the press and the public's response was unequivocal. With some pride, the technician responsible for mounting the dinosaur, Arthur Coggeshall, would later claim that more visitors had come to see Diplodocus than had ever before visited the museum after its opening day in 1881.

During the course of the nineteenth century Watt's chemical work and its importance to his improvements of the steam engine were effectively obscured. There was a significant disjunction between public characterizations of Watt in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries and those extant by the early twentieth. As Watt's early reputation developed and grew, contemporary sources frequently identified him as a chemist and recognized the relevance of his chemical work to the steam engine improvements. By the early twentieth century, however, Watt's chemistry had passed from view. This is readily seen in the events and publications that celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1919 and the two hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1936. So, by some process, during the course of the nineteenth century the recognition of the chemical basis of Watt's steam engine improvements, especially of the first phase of them involving the separate condenser, evaporated. What was that process?

A central element in this process was the ‘water controversy’ concerning whether Watt, Cavendish or Lavoisier should be recognized as the discoverer of the compound nature of water. I have examined this controversy, and the forces that drove it, in considerable detail elsewhere. In this chapter I focus on the way in which the controversy, together with Watt's ‘self-fashioning’ in the later years of his life, radically transformed Watt's chemical reputation and in particular determined the extent to which he was recognized as a chemist at all.

Watt engaged in considerable recasting of his achievement in the years between about 1800 and his death in 1819. During the very early nineteenth century important investigations were being conducted which began to question the material theory of heat, and, even more acutely, the role of heat as a chemical substance. These were key ideas upon which Watt had built his original understanding of steam and of the steam engine. More particularly, from around 1790, a number of investigators, including Agustin de Bétancourt, Gaspard de Prony and John Dalton, conducted and published steam experiments, which in terms of methods, results and interpretation presented challenges to Watt's own.

Rev. William Borlase pursued the study of Cornwall's ancient monuments through fieldwork. As was demonstrated in Chapter 1, he placed great emphasis on the close study of Cornwall's quoits, tolmens, circles, barrows and standing stones in situ and advocated the use of field sketches as the most faithful way of recording ‘what the monument really is’. Although there was something superficially modern about Borlase's attitude, in many ways he remained of his time and was even rather old-fashioned in his approach to antiquarianism. Despite his stern warning, above, against ‘fanciful conjecture’, Borlase's Antiquities was run through with references to the Biblical flood, to the Old Testament and to references to the ancient authors. He was also obsessed with Druids and attributed many of Cornwall's ancient remains to their artifice. For instance, the Cheese-wring – a pile of granite boulders on Bodmin Moor – was a platform from which Druids gave speeches. The stone basins found on top of many of Cornwall's granitetors were created to catch the blood from Druidic sacrifices. The Men an Tol in the Parish of Madern was either for the preparation of children for worship; for the preparation of human sacrifice; or for the restoration of health.

In 1872, the Rev. Borlase's great-great grandson, William Copeland Borlase, published his own contribution to the study of Cornwall's ancient monuments, Naenia Cornubiae. Perhaps to distance himself from the excesses of his late relative, Borlase launched a withering attack on any speculation as to the origins and use of these sites:

The neurologist Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918), who had settled in Frankfurt in 1883 and participated in the foundation of the University of Frankfurt in 1914, reminisced on the intellectual isolation in which Senckenberg Society members worked until the turn of the century:

The four decades from the late 1860s to the turn of the twentieth century saw a fundamental transformation in the Senckenberg Society's identity. Yet historical writing on the institution, as well as contemporaries such as Edinger, who witnessed its spectacular metamorphosis into a modern biological research institute in the first decades of the twentieth century, have failed to acknowledge a less conspicuous, yet equally significant reorganization in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By 1883 when Edinger joined, the Senckenberg Society was already enjoying a revival of intellectual life after a prolonged period of inactivity since mid-century. This chapter aims to show how the arrival of an ambitious and productive generation of naturalists, a generous bequest from the Countess Bose in 1883 and the death of the old, conservative generation had set in motion a comprehensive reassessment of the institution's programme.

The early nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of possibilities for amassing new kinds of experience: through books, magazines and newspapers, which reached out to ever wider audiences in this period; through travel, which became faster, more comfortable and more affordable; and through displays of the world's treasures and novelties at museums, exhibition halls, galleries, theatres, gardens and menageries. In the midst of all these possibilities, individuals expanded their range of experiences vicariously, collecting portraits and biographies of the eminent and privileged and devouring images and descriptive accounts of far-flung corners of the world. They also acquired new experiences in person, setting out to confront the strange, the new, the exotic, the famous and the eccentric face to face.

In September 1847, William Kinsey, Rector of Rotherfield Greys in Oxford-shire, set out to do just this. In a published account of his visit to Walton Hall, home of the naturalist Charles Waterton (1782–1865), he explained:

Kinsey had the pleasure of joining ‘an intellectual party’ in paying a visit to Waterton at his home and, he assured readers of the Gentleman's Magazine, ‘it was ever after a “red letter day” in my remembrance’. In fact, Kinsey was just one of many thousands of people to visit Walton Hall during Waterton's lifetime. Visitors from all walks of life recorded the intense anticipation of setting foot into the picturesque park, where birds and animals were protected against poachers and other predators; of viewing the ‘museum’ in the hallway, with its shimmering, lifelike specimens and satirical taxidermic monstrosities; and, most of all, of coming face to face with the ‘singular and eccentric naturalist’ himself.

The final pages of Virginia Ferrar's pamphlet heralding the ‘rare and new discovery’ for the ‘feeding of silk worms’ are a poetic tribute to the Virginia colony and its agrarian fruitfulness. What Ferrar admired about the silkworm was its utility. Properly cultivated, the silkworm would yield ‘great treasure’ which would be to the advantage of both England and her colonies.

Virginia Ferrar (c. 1627–88), presumably named after the Virgin Queen and the eponymous American colony, was the daughter of John Ferrar (c. 1588– 1657), a deputy to the Virginia Company and a member of four other colonial companies. He owned a large estate in Virginia and published eight pamphlets encouraging planters in the Virginia colony to cultivate silkworms. Ferrar also owned a manor, Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, where his daughter Virginia kept silkworms and wrote poetry extolling the virtue and utility of silk cultivation. The Puritan intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) supervised the publication of ‘The Reformed Virginian Silkworm’ in 1655.

Most scholarship on Samuel Hartlib and his circle centres upon their Puritan religious convictions, their sprawling correspondence and their various pedagogical and social reform programmes. Virginia Ferrar's poem about silk-worms, however, draws our attention to a neglected aspect of the Hartlib Circle's endeavours. This is their extensive work on planting, and the relationship of their natural philosophy to English colonial ventures in the Atlantic.

It is my contention that colonization was a principal intellectual foundation of the Hartlib Circle's natural philosophy, and that they developed their ideas about agrarian cultivation in the context of English colonization in the Atlantic. Moreover, colonies provided the ideal place for the improvement of land: they were experimental spaces where the world could be reformed.

The published versions of Newton's life story in the eighteenth century, being largely based on Fontenelle's ‘Éloge’ (1727), were strikingly similar. While new material had been published, for example by Birch and Turnor, this was yet to be incorporated into a biographical narrative. It was for the following century to interpret manuscript evidence, the crucial factor behind the disputes over Newton's character and biography discussed in the following chapters. Unlike Turnor's Collections, Jean-Baptiste Biot's article on Newton, published in the Biographie universelle (1822), incorporated new material into a significant reinterpretation of Newton's life and work. It has, therefore, been called ‘the first modern critical study of Newton's life and career’. It was the first biography to point to the possibility that Newton suffered a breakdown around the years 1692–3, and therefore to suggest that his genius might have been attended by problems. In doing this Biot both responded and contributed to debates over the meaning and manifestations of genius that have been described in the Introduction. Consideration of the contents of Biot's biography must therefore focus on the controversial topics of Newton's breakdown and his role in the dispute with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over who had priority in the invention of the calculus. However, to understand Biot's approach fully it is also necessary to consider his essay in the context of the waning influence of the previously dominant ‘Laplacian Programme’, to which he was connected. Biot saw the research of the Laplacians as falling within a Newtonian tradition and accused the rising generation of turning their backs on the heritage that he celebrated in this text.

The English translation of Biot's article was published by the SDUK in 1829.