When a member of a scientific institution lamented the lack of financial support for the study of nature in nineteenth-century Frankfurt, the fault was first and foremost laid at the door of the wealthy compatriots, whose meagre monetary contribution revealed their reluctance to fulfil their duty to the community. Few assumed that this duty devolved, at least partly, on the municipal government and its coffers. Thus Wilhelm Kobelt, a malacologist and an ambitious member of a scientific association in Frankfurt, grumbled in his diary on 3 May 1870 that ‘the old Frankfurters who still had money to spare for scientific purposes are becoming ever rarer’. The Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature (Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft), the institution that meant so much to him, was a voluntary association that maintained its facilities, including an extensive natural history museum, solely on the basis of contributions from its members and fellow citizens. Matters of culture and learning followed a tacit and simple rule in nineteenth-century Frankfurt: the residents should tend to it. The institutions and individuals in the public domain were solely responsible for fostering and cultivating the kind of arts and sciences that the dwellers of the city needed. The participation of the government was kept to a minimum, as was its intervention.

On 5 October 1828 an extraordinary spectacle took place on the North Turnpike Road near Newcastle upon Tyne. A local philosopher took it upon himself to demonstrate to the public a new type of vehicle of his own devising, ‘the only Travelling Machine that ever was invented in the World to work from the Centre of Gravity, without the Aid of Horse or Steam’. The philosopher intended the Northumberland Eagle Mail to carry him to the farthest reaches of the kingdom – from England to Scotland, from Scotland to Ireland – to deliver his Lecture on Natural Philosophy wherever a suitable paying audience could be assembled. According to reports in the newspapers, however, he barely survived the short ride to Newcastle from his home town Wallsend.

The Northumberland Eagle Mail was constructed according to the principles of A New System of Natural Philosophy, on the Principle of Perpetual Motion (1821). Its designer, also the author of the New System, hoped that its demonstration would secure his position as Northumberland's leading natural philosopher. He also hoped that the people of Northumberland would reward him financially for his ingenuity. Eager to amass a large audience for his performance, he advertised the event in the newspapers, and produced handbills indicating the significance his achievement:

The promotional campaign was a success. A great crowd assembled on the North Road, mostly on the outskirts of Newcastle, to see for themselves this amazing machine of ‘noble and majestic Appearance’, which, it was claimed, was a ‘superior Mode of Travelling to either Riding or Walking’. Yet setting out from his home in Wallsend, the philosopher had barely got underway when he began to sense ‘that his reception was not very flattering’.

Introduction

A close look at the nuances involved in constructing knowledge regarding astronomy between c. 1830 and c. 1860 has elucidated the manner in which Indians could participate in modern science. This practical engagement was not only striking with respect to the broader context in which modern Western astronomy was instituted in India, with its apparent emphasis on European exclusivity, but was also quite different from the practical engagement which some of the Orientalists had at one point imagined being possible. It was not about expressly dovetailing the paradigms of Western and Siddhantic astronomy. Rather, it was rooted in collective constructions of knowledge. While the colonial constraints on the possibilities associated with this practical engagement have been considered, there is a need now to think about the place of astronomy within colleges in India in this period, the better to understand how educational schemas could influence the engagement between Europeans and Indians. With regards to the institutions under focus here, the most significant were Elphinstone College in Bombay, the Poona Sanskrit College, Hindu College in Calcutta and the Benares Sanskrit College. As for the main educational approaches with regards to astronomy, there is a need to revisit the relatively well-known case of Lancelot Wilkinson (1805–41), but there is also important material associated with Arthur Bedford Orlebar and the ‘Bombay Group’, as they might be called.

On Christmas Day in 1892 Flinders Petrie wrote to Miss Bradbury, Amelia Edwards's closest friend and companion on her Egyptian travels, of his growing frustration at the excavatory practices of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) archaeologist Edouard Naville, who, he claimed, was destroying important Egyptian antiquities. A week later, in a letter to Edward Maunde Thompson, the director of the British Museum, he returned to the subject, concluding that he was concerned ‘solely with the subject of the destruction of archaeological material, which is equally to be deprecated whether done in the name of science or by a plundering Arab’. He proposed that the EEF send as a replacement a more capable man, Howard Carter, ‘who understands what he sees’ even if he had not undertaken the ‘formal education for the best work in excavating’. To be anxious about the loss of precious artefacts is hardly surprising, and it should be even less so in the context of the EEF's stated intention to save Egyptian antiquities from destruction. Yet Petrie's letters do still break certain boundaries of British propriety: of professional courtesy, certainly, but also of personal politeness, by explicitly regarding Naville as having fallen to the level of the Arab antiquities thief. Yet what is most interesting about Petrie's attack on Naville is his excessive anxiety about the loss of artefactual objects: the ‘things’ of Egyptological research.

This chapter begins with several questions. What were some ways in which Britons reformed life research out of the ‘decline of science’ in the late 1820s and early 1830s? Why was there a strong link between philosophical anatomists and radicalism? Why was there an explosion of museums or museum reformation in the 1830s? Why was there a belief that organisms were compounded out of simple parts?

The first, more sweeping, part of this chapter establishes the context and suggests some answers to these queries. By the beginning of the 1830s there appeared a new emphasis in Britain on the style of analysis: synthesis, in which a system was broken up into components which were then studied (analysis), and the system rebuilt out of these components (synthesis). Although there were strong links between the style of analysis: synthesis, philosophical anatomy and calls for the rationalizing reform of British institutions, many researchers, regardless of their politics, embraced this style because of its emphasis on the museum. To illustrate the acceptance of analysis: synthesis, the second part of this chapter then switches perspective, focusing on concrete details. It examines how Owen's early work at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons exemplified the use of analysis: synthesis. Owen's domestication of this style from its dangerous Francophile roots was one reason why he became the premier British comparative anatomist.

But Owen was merely one of a larger group of London-based life researchers. The best way to display this community is to take Martin Rudwick seriously and do so graphically, depicting their relationships and commitments as a topography. Figure 1.1 facilitates synchronic comparisons while also showing several diachronic changes between 1830 and 1850. Also informed by the work of A. H. Barr, Edward Tufte and Randall Collins, such a map allows us to see this book's cast of characters and their backgrounds at a glance.

Correspondence has always played an important role in the historian's search for documentary resources. It is hardly necessary to say that letters can take us into the inner life of individuals, opening up the world of the past as it was experienced, revealing personal feelings and the practical details of daily existence as well as the structures of the society in which the letter-writers lived. Samuel Johnson told Mrs Thrale, ‘In a man's letters, you know madam, his soul lies naked’. The immediacy – the nakedness ’ of personal correspondence makes it a distinctive genre that is frequently drawn upon in biographical writing and in social historical accounts that explore individual experiences. In many ways letters stand as proxies for the person himself or herself; and through letters we can catch echoes of the writers' voices. Literary scholars have known this for many decades. So too have historians of science. Such documents are often moving records of friendship, collegiality, influence, concern and personal support; and supply valuable insights into the careers and minds of scientists and other actors in the past. Without these documents, our interpretations of the work, impact and stature of significant figures would be much the poorer.

Increasingly, however, the personal is giving way to the meta-historical. The physical medium of correspondence is coming to be perceived as a useful way to explore the structure of science. Handwritten letters comprised one of the leading communication ‘technologies’ available to natural philosophers in former centuries.