By 1894, some five years after leading Victorian scientists had called upon the state to support the creation of a ‘Pasteur Institute in Britain’, the building of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine on the Chelsea Embankment was nearing completion. This year, however, was not to be characterized by celebrations of British achievements in bacteriology, so long the preserve of French and German science, but by fierce public opposition, both to the Institute and the location of its laboratories. One particularly public protest took place on 28 April 1894, when protestors – drawn largely from anti-vivisection and labour groups – conducted a parade and mass meeting in Pimlico, which passed by the site of the British Institute laboratories on the way to its rallying point on the Old Pimlico Pier. The handbill for this event very specifically set out its grounds for opposition: ‘to protest against the Erection of the proposed Institute of Preventive Medicine (so called) on the CHELSEA EMBANKMENT (Near Chelsea Bridge)’. Clearly, the geographical placement of the laboratory was one key aspect of public opposition, with ‘public’ in this instance consisting of a miscellany of anti-vivisectionists, suffragists, radical club activists, working-class and friendly societies members, and local residents. The other key areas of opposition to the British Institute were its desire to undertake vivisection, and the concern that the diseases studied at the Institute would be ‘disseminat[ed] … by the germs flying about in the air’ throughout Chelsea.

Introduction

Later nineteenth-century histories of the steam engine were most often written by practising engineers and scientists. They exhibited the common tendency of practitioners to write ‘Whig’ history, that is, to interpret past historical actors and actions in modern terms. This genre of literature, then, assimilated Watt to the modern traditions and conceptions of thermodynamics. In its turn this later nineteenth-century literature has left its mark on modern historical writings.

I am concerned in this chapter with two processes of assimilation of Watt to thermodynamics. The first involves conceptual assimilation of Watt to mid-nineteenth-century understandings of ‘energy’. A typical example of conceptual assimilation is an essay by Keith J. Laidler, which presents Watt and his engine as practical progenitors of that science. Certainly the steam engine was an important resource for those developing thermodynamic understandings. But to picture Watt and his engine ‘pushing’ in that direction is problematic. Even sophisticated and nuanced treatments of the issue fall into a similar trap. The eminent historian of technology, Donald Cardwell, implicitly placed the work of Black and Watt on heat into a tradition of the ‘physics’ of heat, a line leading to the ‘Rise of Thermodynamics’. I have already argued that the excellent and detailed account of the origins of Watt's key invention by Richard L. Hills is also on dangerous territory when deploying the concept of the ‘perfect engine’ in telling that history. Although the term does come from Watt's own accounts of how he arrived at his invention, and therefore must in some sense be reliable, what the term meant to Watt is all too easily lost sight of and elided into later visualizations of ideal heat engines that every modern student learns about as the basis of thermodynamics. The second process of assimilation involved the steam indicator, a device that, because of its mid-nineteenth-century involvement with thermodynamic theory, was often taken as some kind of natural bridge between that theory and Watt, who invented the instrument. As I will show, the rather mysterious, chequered and just plain misunderstood, history of this device encouraged a ‘telescoping’ of its later and early history.

In accord with the arationality assumption, postpositivist historians of the Chemical Revolution rejected any attempt to locate ‘the causative factors in Lavoisier's work’ in the socioeconomic conditions of eighteenth-century France. According to Carleton Perrin, for example, the Chemical Revolution involved a ‘conceptual breakthrough’ which ‘did not follow inversions of polarity in the changing political climate’. Guerlac linked the Chemical Revolution to the unfolding of an ‘internal history’, claiming that the ‘outstanding feature of Lavoisier's Chemical Revolution’ involved the emergence of chemistry from its ‘industrial and practical background’ as ‘an autonomous discipline, a body of theoretical knowledge’ with ‘its own theoretical problems, its own methods of thought and inner logic’. In a similar vein, Marco Beretta emphasized the problems involved in drawing ‘any univocal conclusion on the relation between science and politics’ in the Chemical Revolution. Treating the ‘social context’ as ‘peripheral’ to the unfolding ‘logic’ of the Chemical Revolution, postpositivist scholars examined specific concepts and theories in relation to particular research programmes, disciplinary research traditions and, in some cases, broader cultural and intellectual themes and movements. The theoreticist orientation of postpositivism also downplayed the role of new observations and experimental evidence in the development of science, leading Freddy Verbruggen to claim that ‘the phlogiston controversy, and the disagreement between, for instance, Priestley and Lavoisier, was not a matter of the ‘observation’, but of the INTERPRETATION of chemical processes’.

Back in 1857, when Airy first described plans to observe the transits of Venus, he had proposed to devote most attention to the transit of 1882. The circumstances of the 1882 transit were more favourable for a few reasons: the transit duration was longer and thus its measure should have a smaller degree of error, and the entire transit would be visible from existing observatories throughout North America. The transit of 1882 should have brought an even larger effort by the astronomical community.

An article in the New York Times put a cynical and wildly inaccurate spin on the ‘great popular transit’, making the claim that astronomers in 1874 had purposely hidden the fact that there was to be a transit of Venus in 1882 (and that they also hid the fact that a ‘transit [sic – confused with Mars in ascension] of Mars’, which allegedly could just as well be used to measure the parallax, had been due in 1877).

Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum is the most important systematic study of hardy British trees and shrubs to have been published in the past two centuries, and arguably ever. Its greatest significance lies in the fact that it combined a comprehensive study of trees and shrubs with geographically founded histories of arboriculture, analysis of the importance of trees and shrubs in landscape gardening and full-length portraits of trees at different growth stages. Loudon's ideas concerning arboretums developed in various ways during the 1820s and 1830s in response to his experience of trees in various contexts, including private gardens such as his Bayswater villa, botanical and horticultural society gardens, and country estate collections. The significance of the Arboretum Britannicum and arboretum concept, manifest in various changing forms, can only be fully appreciated if examined in the context of British scientific culture and particularly cultures of natural history. The book must also be judged in terms of Loudon's other efforts to promote botany within gardening and horticulture, encouraging new audiences and practitioners amongst all social classes in the British Isles and Ireland. Scientifically-informed arboriculture and landscape gardening should not be merely the preserve of aristocracy, gentry and their agents as in the days of Humphry Repton.

While Houdini's magical performances and Conan Doyle's fictionalized optical illusions reveal a sympathetic synergy in their articulation of a scopic democracy – and in the process undermine modernity's assumed fragmentation of optical space – their very different relationships to spiritualism can be read as a fracture of that sympathy. Moreover, their fierce opposition to one another on the subject of spiritualism illuminates the possible divergent paths of science and vision under pressure from early twentieth-century commodity capitalism and its stress on conformity to spectacular society. This final chapter will consider Houdini's and Conan Doyle's responses to the key site of spiritualist practice – the séance – as a starting point for a more extensive investigation of the role of vision as it crosses from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, or to put it differently, as it shifts from Victorianism to modernity.

Spiritualism's role in British and American culture has been broadly examined by historians. Its gender, racial and class politics, its role as a new religious movement and its relationships to the ‘dominant ideology of the era’, as Molly McGrath puts it, have all been fertile ground for a consideration of the place of the séance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century societies. Spiritualism’s relationship to science has also been investigated, most profi tably by Richard Noakes, and partly as a result of this work, and partly due to the turn towards the periphery in history of science scholarship generally, the séance has gained some cache as an interesting site of scientific contest.

HMS Rattlesnake returned to England in October 1850. Travelling to London, Huxley gave a letter to Owen from his Australian mentor Macleay. Macleay had been one of the first British researchers to travel to the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle after the war, working with Cuvier, Geoffroy St-Hilaire and the entomologist P. A. Latreille. The letter was a communication from one patron to another: Macleay would consider any favour Owen did for Huxley as a favour for Macleay himself. He recommended Huxley's researches and drawings on the ‘lower pelagic animals’ as especially relevant to ‘the subject of your “Parthenogenesis”’. Owen then applied to the Admiralty for another appointment for Huxley in order for the young surgeon to prepare his Rattlesnake materials. He saw Huxley as a talented researcher who would advance his own work on parthenogenesis and metagenesis (hereafter simply metagenesis). But in the early 1850s Huxley started to turn on him and to subvert metagenesis, as palaetiology spread to a larger community. The first two thirds of this chapter thus examine the clash of different styles of reasoning. This fight occurred between Owen and Huxley over the reality of metagenesis and spermatic force. Huxley rejected spermatic force by denying the validity of Owen's evidence.

The last third of the chapter then looks at Huxley's drive to professionalize life science. This problematic term, ‘professionalize’, is not used to denote a move to make the field soon to be known as biology more specialized, more laboratory-based or more independent. Instead ‘professionalize’ is used here to refer to a more negative process: the systematic exclusion of those life researchers identified as outsiders. Huxley sought to restrict entry to his group, keeping the supply of scientists artificially scarce and their work adequately remunerative. One famous example of this boundary-strengthening can be seen in his well-known rejection of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Perhaps a related but more serious threat was the ‘populist’ science of Lewes, an alternative model to Huxley's cadre of elite biologists.

By 1858, one year before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the world of British life research had already considerably changed from that of the early 1840s. A young London life researcher in the 1840s was taught to some extent to see an organism as an aggregate of elements – bones, nervous ganglia, segments or physiological compartments. Higher organisms' elements were more integrated than lower organisms' elements. In turn we can see nine explanatory principles emerging from these points and reinforcing each other.

1. vivisection. Certain living organisms survived bilateral sectioning while others died immediately, because those organisms surviving such work were aggregations of simpler quasi-independent elements that did not require each other to survive. Each element thus acted as a separate compartment. A lower organism's survivability could even be explained by seeing it as an aggregate of quasi-individuals.

2. homologizing. Homologies between different individuals (general homology) allowed researchers like Owen to imaginatively liken them to homologies within individuals (serial homology). Analysis:synthesis gave the ability for a person to jump levels of organization in this way, because it was possible to depict the relationship of part to whole: whether an entity was a part or a whole depended only on one's perspective.

3. the physiological division of labour. Point 1 noted that animals able to survive extensive vivisection were simpler creatures with less specialized systems which repeated in each element. Conversely those animals dying quickly during vivisection were more complex, with more specialized and often localized physiological systems that could produce more life. Although they were more vulnerable, this specialization meant that these animals could produce more life energy.

4. a hierarchy of general physiological systems. These higher animals also possessed several levels of physiological systems. Their vivisection revealed that some of their physiological systems depended on others, making these supporting systems ‘foundational’ ones. While the removal or destruction of certain body parts (such as the medulla oblongata) immediately caused the death of the entire animal, the removal or destruction of other parts caused only certain functions to be lost.