Translations of [J.-B. Biot], ‘Newton (Isaac)’, in L. G. Michaud (ed.), Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, 83 vols (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1811–53), vol. 31 (1822), pp. 127–94’, as rendered in J. B. Biot, ‘Life of Newton’, trans. H. Elphinstone (1829), in Lives of Eminent Persons, Library of Useful Knowledge (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1833), reprinted in R. Iliffe, M. Keynes and R. Higgitt (eds), Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660–1885, 2 vols (London, Pickering & Chatto, 2006), vol. 2: R. Higgitt (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Biography of Isaac Newton: Public Debate and Private Controversy, pp. 1–63, unless otherwise stated. Translations of other texts, or in different chapters, are given in the notes.

Where Elphinstone's translation has significantly altered the meaning, or where he did not translate a phrase at all, a modern translation has been provided. Elphinstone's translation was neither faithful nor very skilful. His alterations tended to moderate Biot's heightened language and the image of the Romantic genius.

p. 23, ‘le créateur … jamais existé’ (p. 169): ‘almost the creator of Natural Philosophy, as one of the chief promoters of mathematical analysis’ (Elphinstone, p. 43). The translation adds the ‘almost’ and misses out ‘foremost among the physicists that have ever existed’.

p. 23, ‘la prééminence … de l'esprit humain’ (p. 165): ‘a lasting pre-eminence over all other productions of the human mind’ (Elphinstone, p. 39). The translation adds ‘lasting’.

p. 23, ‘un homme qui … à Newton même’ (p. 139): ‘a man of extensive acquirements, and of an original turn of thought, with great activity of mind’ (Elphinstone, p. 13). ‘A man who, for genius of invention and extent of insight was scarcely inferior to Newton himself ’ (translation Caroline Higgitt).

p. 23, ‘une excessive ambition de renommée’ (p. 139): ‘an excessive desire of renown’ (Elphinstone, p. 13).

p. 23, ‘le grand avantage … dans les sciences’ (p. 139): ‘the great advantage possessed by Newton, and which assured to his researches a precision and a certainty hitherto unknown in science’ (Elphinstone, p. 14).

In 1858 John de Fraine, one of the not inconsiderable band of popular but subsequently obscure public lecturers of Victorian Britain, was announced to give his first professional lecture at the Sailors' Institute, Shadwell. It was, de Fraine later recalled, ‘a rather trying experience’.

Introduction

Evolutionary naturalism has been traditionally identified with empiricism and materialism, in opposition to the metaphysical speculations of the movement's theological antagonists. Typical in this regard was the definition of the movement given by James Ward in his Gifford Lectures, which was cited by Frank Turner in Between Religion and Science:

As Turner stressed in his gloss on this definition, scientific (or evolutionary) naturalism repudiated supernaturalism and constructed its interpretation of man, nature and society from the theories, methods and categories of empirical science rather than from rational analysis. In temperament it was secular; in philosophy, empiricist. It held that the scientific method was the only means of acquiring true knowledge, and this method in turn gave support to three theories which were eagerly embraced by the scientific naturalists: Dalton's theory of the atom, the law of the conservation of energy, and the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Steven Shapin summed up the contrasting implications of postpositivism and postmodernism for the historiography of eighteenth-century science in the following words:

While Shapin and his constructivist allies championed the ‘developing perspective’ at the expense of the ‘older view’, some of his colleagues worried that the emphasis that sociological contextualism gave to the ‘contextuality and contingency involved in scientific research’ problematized the obvious ‘intersubjective character’ of that research, denied the conditions of generalizability necessary to historical explanation, encouraged an unproductive relativism inimical to a normative sociology of scientific knowledge, and pointed towards ‘an extreme, obviously absurd form of positivism and solipsism’. Considering these problems through the lens of eighteenth-century studies, Golinskiclaimed that the ‘essential problem appears to be that of specifying the unity of the Enlightenment in a way which complements the analyses of the separate contexts in which it occurred, without obliterating their individuality’.

An adequate solution to this ‘essential problem’ has important consequences for our understanding of the Chemical Revolution as an integral part of the Enlightenment.

This book was motivated by recent work in the history of science and cultural and historical geography and a belief that arboretums have had a profound impact on British cultural and scientific history. We embark upon an exploration of the historical and cultural geographies of nineteenth-century arboretums in order to try to understand the various principles and practices underpinning their design and the management and consumption of tree collections, particularly tensions between naturalistic and geometric aesthetics and botanical taxonomies. This book traces interconnections between horticulture, botany and forestry, the role of institutions and the relationships between arboretums and their various social and cultural contexts including the horticultural trade, scientific development of forestry and importance of international networks, exploration, trade and imperialism in tree collecting. Although the principal focus is British arboretums (with some reference to the Republic of Ireland), just as John Claudius Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838, hereafter Arboretum Britannicum) was something of an international collaboration, and like nineteenth-century planted arboretums, any study of British arboretums is inherently both national and international.

This book is the result of a major project on the cultural and historical geographies of the arboretum begun at the School of Geography, Nottingham University and funded between 2004 and 2007.

Located on the east side of London's Leicester Square, the Sablonière Hotel provided the setting for a well-attended meeting on the evening of 4 February 1851. The chairman declared that the purpose of the meeting was to consider what should be done with the square, which had become a public nuisance. James Wyld, a cartographer and geographical publisher, then rose and laid out an ambitious proposal for the construction of a colossal globe in the centre of the square for ‘the purpose of exhibition’. Wyld unveiled a ‘well-executed model of his monster globe, with plans, sections, and diagrams of the several compartments’. The unique building would nearly fill the large enclosure at the centre of the square. It would contain a globe-shaped representation of the earth sixty feet in diameter and adjoining rooms that would exhibit geographical and ethnographical specimens, including minerals and costumes. Wyld estimated that the total cost of the exhibition would be £21,000. He reported that he had purchased the freehold of the site of the enclosure from the Tulke family for £3,000. A proviso was built into the agreement: if, at the expiration of ten years, he chose to discontinue the exhibition, he would return the ground to the inhabitants of the square ‘in a neat and ornamental order’. Similarly, if the venture was unsuccessful and he was forced to close at an earlier period, he promised to restore the ground in an improved state.

The main route I have taken through this book has been the broad path where science and literature are knitted together. I have traced their individual paths, of course; and I imagine them topographically as running in parallel, one always visible to the other but kept apart by a thick vegetation between. More interesting territory, however, has been those moments when the two paths close up to form a wider route, broken still by a grassy central reservation but one which is worn by continual crossings over and is sometimes entirely eroded.

This analogy, I hope, registers the fact that science and literature remain different but sometimes come close to being the same. I have suggested, for example, that literature makes efforts to become science. This is not to say that the literary text is on a path that leads it to be, in the end, a work of science. In fact the opposite is true: in becoming science, the literary text enters into a series of correspondences with science which positions it in relation to science. The literary text does not imitate or resemble science, but by becoming science, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue, it ‘form[s] a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations’.

Irish Catholics and nationalists practiced and promoted science during the nineteenth century, yet science did not become integral to Irish national identity. This fact was both reflected in and influenced by the role which science played in Irish print culture. The abortive project to issue a history of Irish natural philosophers, mooted by Daniel Owen Madden and intended to form part of the ‘Library of Ireland’, shows how easily science was sidelined from national narratives. The ‘Library of Ireland’ was published by the Catholic publishing house James Duffy and was identified with the nationalist Young Ireland movement. Madden claimed his book would be ‘an attractive, readable, popular, and most useful volume’ which would offer biographies of past philosophers such as Kirwan and Molyneaux, but add modern philosophers such as Robert Kane. The book was never published and the ‘Library of Ireland’, once completed, consisted almost exclusively of history and literature. The exclusion of science from narratives of Irish identity extended beyond a single popular book series as this chapter will demonstrate. One nationalist later recalled that there was no Irish school of scientific thought, despite many outstanding individuals. This chapter tries to understand why, if science was prevalent in Irish life, it was absent from Irish self-definition.

Previous chapters have demonstrated that science was an integral part of efforts to reform Irish education and society. Yet science did not serve a similar function in one of the most pervasive reform movements of the century – that to re-form Ireland as an independent nation. There appears to have been a disconnect between Irish scientific reformers and wider Irish culture. As Madden's failure to have men of science included in the ‘Library of Ireland’ shows, it was difficult to identify an Irish scientific tradition or to link scientific reform with nationalist aims.

Dead life falls to the bottom of the seabed, settles in the mud. Sand and silt slowly gather above. Time passes, sediment presses, seas recede. Under pressure the once live substance waits. Millennia pass, then, in 1858, oil that has lain in the archive of sediment for so long is pulled up into activity by North America's first commercial oil well in Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada. Oil gushes higher than the treetops, slathering the workers and the land, turning the Black Creek black, running into the Sydenham River which then empties nearby into the St Clair River.

The St Clair River forms a natural passage between wide Lake Huron and shallow Lake St Clair. Water then continues to flow south as the short Detroit River, which then empties into Lake Erie. Within the Great Lakes region that straddles Canada and the United States, the St Clair and Detroit Rivers together cut a border between the United States on the west bank and Canada on the east. Water flows from mostly white Sarnia at the top of the St Clair River down towards the ruins of contemporary majority black Detroit. Today, the St Clair is a deep water shipping channel connected to inland shipping laneways leading out to the Atlantic Ocean. The river is crossed by bridges that carry railroads and highways that then go on to traverse continental North America.

The Victorian literary critic George Saintsbury believed in ‘the cautious drawing of conclusions’. Nevertheless, the final chapter of his magisterial survey A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896) offers some powerful opinions about trends in reading and writing towards the close of the century. Among other things, he seems troubled by a growing cultural divide between literature and science. ‘Unfortunately’, he writes, ‘while the scientific side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the aesthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense’. Out of context, this remark appears to suggest that Saintsbury was an early proponent of the ‘two cultures’ division of intellectual activity between scientific types and ‘literary intellectuals’, as outlined by C. P. Snow over sixty years later. However, a closer look at Saintsbury's text reveals that quite the opposite is the case. His conception of ‘literature’ is broad, embracing works of history, philosophy, theology, journalism, political economy and natural history – any text, in fact, that demonstrates literary ‘style’, whatever its subject matter. And yet ‘science’ clearly connotes something different from the range of meanings associated with the word by Snow, and by most readers since. For example, Saintsbury's statement, quoted above, about the ‘unscientific’ nature of recent literary activity is immediately illustrated by his fury at those critics who ‘will sometimes discourse on Aeschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect’ – a weighty charge indeed.

Rarely do historians describe seventeenth-century English natural philosophers as colonialists. Rarely, too, has there been serious scholarly discussion of natural philosophers’ involvement in the intellectual and practical processes of English empire-building. This is a curious omission. It may surprise some historians of the British Empire to learn that Robert Boyle served on the board of the English East India Company, held shares in the Hudson's Bay Company, and served as President of the New England Company, a missionary society which sponsored the translation of the Bible into the indigenous Algonquian language. He also served on the Council for Foreign Plantations. Boyle's intellectual predecessor Francis Bacon held shares in the Virginia Company, the Newfoundland Company, and wrote extensively on the issue of colonizing Ireland. Moreover, many of Boyle's contemporaries in the Hartlib Circle, as well as those in the Royal Society of London such as Sir Hans Sloane and Henry Oldenburg, maintained an avid interest in the English colonies.

Natural philosophers’ colonial involvement, and their absence from histories of the British Empire's intellectual origins, compels a historical question. What understanding of empire did natural philosophers hold? The answer to this question is startling. In his tract, Of the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, Boyle described his overarching project as the re-creation of ‘The Empire of Man over inferior Creatures’. This was the framework through which he understood his involvement in the institutions of English colonization.

Boyle's motivation for involving himself in English colonization was not that of establishing virtuous new commonwealths in North America. Nor was it primarily about the profit from the plantations in the Caribbean or in Ireland, the latter of which he was himself a direct beneficiary. It was not even England, as a realm under the unchallenged authority of King Charles II, which constituted Boyle's primary ideal of ‘empire’. Rather, the ‘empire of man over inferior creatures’ denoted the original dominion that Adam commanded over nature in the Garden of Eden.

By way of introduction I need to do two things. The first is to provide a historical outline of the life of James Watt, a general overview that will assist in situating my specific, and rather specialized, argument about the centrality of chemistry to his life and work. The second is to explain the structure and the strategy of my study, as well as some of the basic assumptions that underlie it.

The ‘Great Steamer’ – A Life Outlined

James Watt, who the geologist Roderick Murchison referred to in 1839, with a peculiar mixture of deference, affection and condescension, as ‘the Great Steamer’, had been born just over a hundred years earlier, in 1736, to a moderately prosperous merchant family in Greenock, a small town on the lower reaches of the River Clyde, near Glasgow in Scotland. Watt's paternal grandfather was a ‘professor’ of mathematics, teaching that subject and navigation in a community dominated increasingly in the mid-eighteenth century by maritime trade. Watt's father was a ships’ chandler and general merchant. While Watt's elder brother John entered the family business – he was lost at sea on a merchant venture – the family was prosperous enough to invest in an informal apprenticeship for Watt to the London-based instrument maker John Morgan. The young Watt's time in London was undoubtedly difficult. He worked exceedingly hard and suffered problems with his health. But the experience opened up for him a world of instruments, skills and trade that profoundly shaped his later career.

The next step in that career was Watt's establishment as an instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, within the confines of the College. Though Watt certainly did make and repair instruments for the professorate of the College he also engaged in a more general trade in musical instruments and fancy toys. In the early days he was also an agent for his father's business and plied the general hardware trade. By all accounts, as a child Watt had been studious and thoughtful, though his education at the local grammar school had been badly interrupted by health problems.

Introduction

The most important scientific message of Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum was that botany was essential to all aspects of arboriculture from the economic and cultural uses of trees and tree products to effective artistic depictions of trees and landscape gardening. This paralleled Loudon's friend and collaborator John Lindley's attempt to place botany on a more rigorous, serious ‘masculinized’ and scientific institutional footing and raise its status in relation to physics and chemistry. With relatively few indigenous species and a flourishing commercial nursery sector, hardy and half hardy trees and shrubs provided a manageable subset of plants and demonstrated the efficacy of the Candollean natural system. The extensive scientific, economic, cultural and statistical information in the Arboretum Britannicum conveyed a sense of weighty learning, authority, professionalism and comprehensiveness whilst satisfying the Victorian desire for natural historical facts, objects and specimens. Loudon was criticized for a lack of moral and religious feeling and content in his applications of science to nature for instance, in relation to garden cemeteries. However, the unrivalled and daunting enumeration of facts that characterized all his works generated a secular form of wonder partially replacing the celebration of divine nature and natural theological assumptions underpinning most early and mid-Victorian natural historical works. The relentless accumulation of information added weight to the core scientific message that modern physical, anatomical and taxonomic botany was essential to modern arboriculture.