The history of scientific classifications is obviously not the history of human variety. The history of scientific classifications of human variety is the history of how those schemes contributed to the scientific ideology of race. It is via this route that the classification or system of classifications of human variety contributed mightily to the formulation of the concept of race. It is not that science alone gave us our concept of race. The history of the scientific classifications of human variety demonstrates the extent to which scientific classification is a dynamic – sometime cooperative, sometimes contradictory – technology of power. In the nineteenth century, scientific classification was but one of many contributors to racialist and segregationist ideology. There was, of course, much more going on in the world, and certainly the American South's peculiar institution would have made race a concern without any help from or reference to scientific ideology.

And yet, the scientific classification of human variety did serve to legitimize the disciplinary formations which emerged during the nineteenth century: the sciences of life, especially biology and ecology; and the sciences of society, especially sociology, social work and criminology, emerged from the wreckage of polygenism, natural history and political economy. These provided nodal points around which the scientific ideology of race could be formed and manipulated. Once this occurred, the everyday notion of race as the explanation for human variety could become the scientific view, and vice versa.

Government observatories of the nineteenth century were not generally important sites of experimentation and research. Experimentation was something more likely to be found – in Britain at least – in a private observatory or laboratory. But the case of the transit of Venus would be different. Although the general plan to be followed was 200 years old, and although the basic set-up would be the same as it had for the transit of 1769 a century earlier, the astronomers preparing for 1874 faced major unknowns. During the four years between the establishment of the programme and the day of the transit of Venus, preparations would consist largely of time-pressured research and experimentation into these unknowns. The highly-refined surveillance of celestial motions that defined Greenwich astronomy would be supplemented with speculative experimental investigations into subjects ranging from conductivity in telegraphic wires to the shape of the sun to the properties of photographic emulsions. Greenwich would come to look more like the private astrophysical observatories of men such as Norman Lockyer, and in the process Airy would enlist the help of some of the most prominent amateur astronomers.

The direction and scope of research was shaped by a number of issues, with the dominant concerns circling around the black drop phenomenon. In the early 1870s there also emerged new theories about the physical nature of the sun that bore directly on the black drop and other key issues, especially those relating to photography. Photography was just one of a whole new range of technologies available for making different sorts of approaches to the transit of Venus measurements, and by and large these technologies would have to be applied in new and untested ways. At almost every stage in the development of the programme there was virtually no clear agreement among the experts from different nations about the best way of proceeding.

While the programmes in France, Germany and the United States were organized around commissions, in Britain Airy was the sole manager. He described his management philosophy to Arthur Auwers at the Berlin observatory in 1873: The British arrangements for the transit of Venus do, in fact, rest with me.

Apart from the unlucky recipients of electric shock documented in Chapter 3 and patients of electrotherapists, the primary encounter with electricity in the late nineteenth century was visual: the electric light. Yet, in more than one sense, early electric lighting caused major headaches for many of those who first encountered it and for reasons quite unlike those commonly attributed to coal gas illumination (Chapter 4). The aesthetic problems of electric lighting touched on by previous historians were not merely transitory inconveniences, they were serious enough to become a real challenge to those seeking to domesticate electricity. A related problem was that, for more than a decade after the public debut of Swan and Edison domestic lamps in 1880–1, electric light was so expensive that it could only be construed as a luxury affordable by the upper-middle classes and aristocracy; only the most optimistic projectors argued that it was a viable economic competitor to gas or candle lighting. In order to be represented as a luxurious commodity for the upper classes to consume, and for the rest of the population to aspire to, the electric light had to be represented within the aesthetic framework of luxury consumption as a (potentially) pleasant, even indulgent, experience.

Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum has had a profound impact on the history of British arboriculture ever since its publication, unavoidably obscuring arboricultural works published prior to this and shaping subsequent interpretations of nineteenth-century tree collections. To fully contextualize Loudon's magnum opus and to appreciate its significance in the history of natural history we will examine some preceding arboretums and arboricultural works. This chapter argues that botanical society gardens were the first type of public and semi-public urban institutions with significant tree and shrub collections prior to the 1820s and that the challenges of applying Linnaean botany to arboriculture were first confronted leading to experiments with natural arrangements. Newly imported trees and shrubs were eagerly sought and presented but challenged taxonomic ideas and gardening practices, underscoring tensions between practical botany, education, popular natural history and publications. From the late eighteenth century, British botanical gardens began to present natural alongside Linnaean arrangements which impacted upon arboricultural publications such as Aylmer Bourke Lambert's Genus Pinus (1802–24) and Peter William Watson's Dendrologia Britannica (1825).

Older purposes of physic gardens were not entirely forgotten and, aided by active patronage from medical men, the potential to exploit plants for medicinal uses remained important, rhetorically if not often in practice. However, British botanical gardens and arboretums helped to develop and satisfy a new audience for botanical and arboricultural education. Private and semi-private institutions relied upon income from members, patrons and visitors whose expectations of the gardens had to be satisfied.

In his Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady (1771–3), Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed:

Rousseau's diagnosis was right; botany may have been a loosely defined subject in the late eighteenth century but, whatever it was, it was moribund, enslaved by medicine. New knowledge was rarely sought or found. In universities across Europe, botany was taught only to inform prospective doctors how to recognize materia medica, plants such as feverfew, foxglove and poppy, of interest for their medicinal properties. It would be another hundred years before botany emerged as a vital, independent science, free from medicine and founded on measurement and experiment.

Similarly, it would not be until the late nineteenth century – when women began to take their place at the laboratory bench – that botany would escape another misfortune; one placed upon its shoulders by male writers, including Rousseau, who, while undoubtedly popularizing the subject, characterized it as an amusing diversion or hobby for gentlewomen. Whereas the poorest of women had traditionally collected from the fields and hedgerows plants for the herbalists, these writers recommended that collecting and drying, naming and drawing plants, were now proper and praiseworthy pursuits for ladies. The problem was not the feminization of botany per se but rather its amateurization, and the sorts of botanical pursuits that were being promoted. What hope was there for the subject when the founder and President of the Linnean Society, James Edward Smith, wrote in the Preface to his Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany(1807):

Botany's development into an independent, experimental science was slow. As late as 1857, the respected literary review, the Athenaeum, was still able to complain:

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the unprecedented expansion of science teaching at the highest levels. In the 1840s the Museum of Irish Industry and the Queen's Colleges opened, followed by the Catholic University in 1854. These institutions responded to the perceived need for technical and scientific education in Ireland while also providing new opportunities for the Catholic middle classes in particular. Yet these new developments also drew science into political and religious controversies over the control of education. As one Catholic appointee was later to state, ‘It is not a desirable thing that scientific appointments should be mixed up with the question of religion; but in Ireland, unfortunately, this has long been the rule.’ In Ireland religion was also politics and thus scientific appointments and the philosophy of science education were thoroughly mixed up with political and religious controversy during the nineteenth century.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, scientific societies participated in the movement for educational reform in nineteenth-century Ireland. They offered alternative means of education, both formally through lectures and informally by encouraging self-education. Their members were also frequently advocates for the reform of education on a wider scale and thus many of them were supporters of plans to create new places of higher education in provincial Ireland. Sir Robert Peel's administration introduced the Colleges (Ireland) Act in 1845 in order to meet just such a demand.

Our epigraphs serve two purposes. First, they disrupt the classification, by contemporaries and historians, of Tyndall as an expert and Lewes as a popularizer. John Tyndall (1820–93), although an expert experimental physicist and member of the scientific elite, was by the end of his life better known as a popularizer, or‘expositor’, of science. George Henry Lewes (1817–78), by occupation a journalist, critic and popular writer, tried to establish his credentials as a scientific researcher. Here, Lewes is praised for his expertise and Tyndall praised, backhandedly, for ‘distinction in the popular field’.

Second, the epigraphs hint at the contested nature of scientific authority in Victorian Britain. Tait's criticism of Tyndall was made during a series of bitter exchanges. His hostility was driven by personal antagonism, philosophical objections to Tyndall's metaphysical naturalism and nationalist indignation at Tyndall's denigration of Tait's fellow Scottish natural philosophers.

In 1843 Baden Powell, who had succeeded Stephen Rigaud to the Savilian Professorship of Geometry, reviewed his predecessor's Historical Essay on the Principia and Correspondence of Scientific Men. He noted with pleasure that ‘the attention of several eminent persons has been more closely than heretofore directed to the details of our scientific history in general, and more especially to the eventful period of which Newton formed the brightest ornament’. In an essay published in the same year, De Morgan also commented on this phenomenon. After listing Brewster's Life of Newton, Rigaud's Works and Correspondence of Bradley (1832), Mark Napier's Memoirs of John Napier (1834), Baily's Account and Rigaud's Historical Essay, he noted that these ‘coming so close together, make a remarkable epoch in biographical writing’. The succeeding decade saw the brief existence of the Historical Society of Science (HSS), a number of important essays by De Morgan, and C. R. Weld's History of the Royal Society. Looking on to the 1850s we note works such as Joseph Edleston's Correspondence of Newton and Cotes, Brewster's Memoirs of Newton and Robert Grant's History of Astronomy. What the HSS and these works had in common was a focus on manuscript sources; it was their evidential detail and precision that commentators found noteworthy. However, this period is now known better for the publication of works of broader scope, based on secondary sources, including Powell's own History of Natural Philosophy (1834) and Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (1837).

These narrative or philosophical works have received great, and often exclusive, attention from those historians who have examined the nineteenth-century historiography of science. H. Floris Cohen believes that Whewell's History should have guided other historians of science but this was the ‘follow-up that failed to occur’.

In 1882, James Geikie, member of the Geological Survey and resident of Perth, used the platform afforded him as President of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science (PSNS) to sketch the traits of the ‘true naturalist’. His counterpoint was the ‘mere collector of curiosities’ or the ‘pseudo-naturalist’ and the museums which had resulted from the ‘mania of collecting’. Collections composed of every kind of curio might evoke ‘occult musings’ but they could not impart knowledge of the ‘wonderful adaptations and harmonies of nature’. In contrast, the true naturalist systematically uncovered the ordered laws of nature. Geikie's ideal was not ‘a mere one-idea'd man … but a philosophical specialist whose mind is open to light from all quarters’. As such individuals also demonstrated, the cultivation of one of the several subjects making up the natural sciences could ‘quicken the observing faculty, sharpen the reasoning powers, and expand the imagination’. In short, the disciplined but ‘philosophical’ study of natural science was, for Geikie, ‘admirably adapted … for the purposes of self-culture’.

Chapters 2 and 3 have indicated the ways in which associational natural history was construed as part of mid- to late nineteenth-century Scottish civil society. Presenting the natural history society as a significant local cultural enterprise involved, it has been argued, a complex set of negotiations between conceptions of scientific work and conduct and activities deemed appropriate and relevant for civic culture. This chapter, in keeping with the emphasis on science as civic culture, aims to further situate the activities of natural history societies by looking at the kind of individual who epitomized the ‘true’ or civic naturalist. In particular, it examines the ways in which representations of prominent members resisted a characterization of the naturalist as ‘neither particularly godly, nor particularly virtuous, nor particularly polite’ a characterization that others have argued was on the ascendancy in mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain.

Scottish natural history societies, situated in civic culture and orientated towards a local public, were also significantly shaped by connections with a wider scientific community. One ruling objective of the societies, to explore and catalogue local natural history, was of potential interest to a scientific as well as a local audience. In order to render such activities useful to science, certain procedures and lines of investigation were promoted to secure scientific credibility. The recommendation of certain methods and projects was supplemented by fostering links, formal and informal, with other scientific bodies and by creating a library of scientific texts to keep pace with wider developments. Such links in terms of strength, number and duration varied from society to society and in ways connected with, but also distinct from, the relations between naturalists’ associations and local civic society. This chapter examines the ways in which the societies managed their self-styled scientific transactions. Particular attention is given to the basic organizational features that connected the societies to a wider scientific world, and to the published output of members who were particularly concerned with their society's scientific reputation.

The chapter is divided into four parts. The first deals with the relationship between Scottish natural history societies and emerging scientific specialisms. This discloses something of the geography of disciplinary affinity as manifested by the scientific activities of society members. The section demonstrates that local contingencies and individual interests meant the scientific pursuits of society members tended to cluster around certain specialisms. Before 1883, for example, the Natural History Society of Glasgow was an important centre for Scottish ornithology. Examining these dominant interests in the light of wider disciplinary contexts situates further the scientific ambitions of the societies in the world of mid- to late Victorian scientific endeavour. Part two examines informal links set up between societies and other scientific constituencies.

At the Annual Meeting of the RIC on 31 October 1856, Dr Charles Barham, the senior physician at the Royal Cornwall Infirmary, gave an impromptu talk on the history of meteorology in Cornwall. This history, Barham noted, was a long one. The results of meteorological observations held by the Institution stretched back almost a hundred years, beginning with those kept by the Gregor family at their estate at Trewarthenick from 1765 to 1787; then those of Mr James of Redruth from 1787 to 1817; and Mr Edward Giddy's records from 1807 to 1827. Barham claimed that these observations predated those of the Royal Society of London and ‘that the possession of records for a long period was necessary for the establishment of general laws in almost any case, and particularly in reference to climate’. A long-running record of the weather, combined with present-day observations, he claimed, would allow the meteorologist to determine whether there had been temporal changes in the climate of an area or, conversely, whether local climates were static and unchanging. Cornwall was well placed to contribute to this agenda.

In his talk, Barham went on to argue for the more general value of meteorological data. Having a number of weather stations across a region would provide information on the geography of weather and climate, he claimed. This was critical for a county like Cornwall, which relied so heavily on tourism, fishing and agriculture. Invalids, Barham claimed, needed to know whether a milder climate would be found in Newquay or Penzance; sailors needed to know from which direction the prevailing wind came and which course storms usually followed; while farmers needed to know which areas were usually damp and which dry.

The application of meteorological information to the improvement of industry, health and wealth was not of course restricted to the county of Cornwall. The 1850s was a decade where meteorology became widely pursued. Only two years prior to Barham's talk, the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade had been established, under the stewardship of Robert FitzRoy.

After the publication of Baily's Account of Flamsteed, Rigaud, Edleston and De Morgan further extended Newtonian scholarship through the investigation of defined topics and publication of manuscript collections. Brewster's second biography of Newton, the Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, had to tackle the perceived charges against Newton's character and incorporate the new information made available in these texts. The reviews of his 1831 Life of Newton had criticized him for relying solely on secondary sources so, because of this and the fact that he was tackling a series of works that were based on large amounts of primary material, it is unsurprising that Brewster began his research among the Portsmouth Papers. His new reliance on such sources can therefore be seen as dictated by his need to find an authoritative means of defence. The contents of his book were also reactive to the work of other writers, tackling the problematic issues identified in the previous three decades. This counteractive and defensive element of the Memoirs of Newton is identified in this chapter through Brewster's research and writing process and through his treatment of the controversial themes in comparison to the approach of his critics, especially De Morgan. The topics that caused Brewster most anguish were Newton's quarrels with Flamsteed and Leibniz, his Antitrinitarianism and his interest in alchemy. Brewster published new evidence on all these points which, although it significantly altered his portrayal of Newton, was presented as positively as possible. Brewster also considered occasional suppression justifiable. However, despite Brewster's continued insistence that Newton's ‘social character’ was ‘modest, candid, and affable, and without any of the eccentricities of genius’, his evidence projected a very different image. What Brewster left implicit was to be presented explicitly by many of his reviewers. Brewster's defensiveness appeared in one further area: his treatment of the history of optics.