Although Newton's reputation was used to emphasize the ‘decline of science’ agenda, one of the reformers adopted a different hero. Francis Baily's 1835 Account of the Revd. John Flamsteed appeared to some as much an attack on Newton and Edmund Halley as it was a vindication of the first Astronomer Royal and, although Baily always claimed neutrality, it is clear where his sympathies lay. Because of the controversy surrounding the publication and the importance of its contents to Newtonian biography, Baily's work is an integral part of the story that relates the increase in knowledge about Newton and the sources that described his life. This chapter first concentrates on the production of the work, drawing particular attention to tactics used in the presentation of controversial material. Baily's motivations in publishing can be seen to reflect his scientific interests and the sphere of the scientific community with which he was identified. Only 250 copies of the Account were printed and the chosen audience largely overlaps with the scientific constituency of the RAS, of which Baily was a key member. Baily used the Account to advertise a particular set of values that he thought fundamental to both practical astronomy and documentary history.

The Account was extensively commented on in the press and in private correspondence. Most notoriously, some, particularly the Cambridge-based William Whewell and the Oxford Savilian Professor Stephen Rigaud, reacted with alarm to the apparent attack on Newton's character. This hostile reception has been discussed by a number of historians. Richard Yeo has highlighted the debate's ‘appeal to assessments of character, both intellectual and moral, as a means of attributing blame’ and its implications for notions of the relationship between observers and theorists and the nature of private and public scientific property. William Ashworth has developed these themes, asserting that the debate

Introduction

In a polemical missive published in the Freeman's Journal on 20 June 1845, the popular science lecturer and controversialist Daniel William Cahill (1796–1864) addressed the Roman Catholic bishops of Ireland on the subject of geology. In his lengthy epistle Cahill set out to prove that ‘more virulent misrepresentations of Catholic doctrine … are circulated by the geologists of our times than any of our bitterest opponents’. Quoting from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Leveson Vernon Harcourt's Doctrine of the Deluge among other sources Cahill's aim was to reveal the anti-Catholic bias of geological texts of all stripes. What concerned Cahill most was the possibility that Ireland's Catholic population would be exposed to similar prejudices in the lecture hall. Using the kind of highly-charged rhetoric that became his trademark Cahill announced that, ‘the auditory of a scientific lecturer are, as it were, disarmed: being not prepared for the attack they offer no resistance and the wound inflicted reaches the heart at once – it is fatal’. For Cahill this demonstrated why it was necessary that Roman Catholic students should be taught science by Roman Catholic professors (Cahill assured his readers that he had never heard professors of his own creed use science for sectarian ends). In arguing thus Cahill echoed the widely held views that scientific speech should be free from political or religious import and that the lecture room more than the reading room shaped public opinion.

In the foregoing pages I have explored the domestication of electricity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, comparing this experience to that of the USA. I have shown that the two-pronged process of domestication involved considerable efforts from popularizers and entrepreneurs to accomplish. This labour was required both to show the public that electricity and its lighting technologies could be both effectively understood and tamed so that householders could electrify their homes without fear, aesthetic objections or undue uncertainty about the future consequences of electrification. It is clear, however, that such enterprises were only partly successful. The attempt to find a stable characterization for electricity was most problematic of all; wide-ranging debate on the identity and behaviour of electricity lasted into the second decade of the twentieth century coexisting with anthropomorphism of electricity as a congenial agent of domestic progress.

Those issues and debates disappeared from view eventually, however, as technocratic domestication brought a pragmatic solution: for those who allowed it into their home, daily consumption of electricity brought such a mundane familiarity to the mysterious agency that lingering concerns about its character and trustworthiness in the home fell away. Nevertheless there were some householders who lived out their days without adopting the new agency and its illuminating qualities, sticking loyally to gas and paraffin lamps instead until the day they died. For those sceptics who long continued to reject electricity and embrace gas for the purposes of cooking and heating, the structural domestication of electricity was never completed, and still is not complete in the fullest sense of the term.

This uncompleted domestication of electricity raised some significant and interrelated questions about authority and in turn about gender. Given the pronouncements of technically expert males that electricity was more safe, reliable and pleasant to have in the home than gas, we need to ask why their judgments were only partially accepted by some householders, while others hardly accepted them at all.

The previous two chapters investigated analysis. This chapter examines the related method of synthesis. Like analysis, synthesis channelled researchers' attention onto the problematics of spontaneous order and compound individuality. Recapitulation – the ‘parallelism’ of the development of the embryo and the place of a species on the animal scale – fascinated them, for it was a process whereby dispersed and independent parts fused together into an integrated whole. Specific research questions included: how was an embryo's development similar to the process of insect metamorphosis, resembling the fusion of parts into a compound whole? How did monsters – frequently doubled animals, such as conjoined twins – grow, and what commonalities did they have with lower animals?

This chapter also considers several questions pertinent to the history of British biology between 1830 and 1850. Why was there such an enormous emphasis upon recapitulation before von Baerian embryology really took hold in British life research? Why were there continuous discussions about more ‘perfect’ or ‘higher’ animals in a scale of being? Why was there an emphasis on ‘centripetal’ patterns of development, set against ‘centrifugal’ patterns? At an even higher level is a question relevant for historians of biology in general: what does the recurrence of a number of organisms in textbooks, lectures and research articles – here called exemplar organisms – say about how life researchers were educated?

Cephalization

It has been noted how Cuvier tried to use nervous structure as one taxonomic index. He implicitly depicted animals as higher or lower according to their proportion of nervous tissue. In the mid-1830s both Grant and Owen adopted Cuvier's method and other British researchers followed them, for Cuvier was seen as vindicated by another commonplace belief – that embryos developed by fusing parts. In so doing each part's ganglion became concentrated in a central location. In 1834 Newport noted how it was ‘well known’ that, during development, nerves tended to ‘approach and unite with each other, the lateral cords and ganglia are more closely approximated, and the ganglia in the anterior part of the body approach and coalesce into one mass’.

In 1877 William Allingham, a poet with connections to the Pre-Raphaelite school of painters and writers, then editor of Fraser's Magazine, wrote a piece for his own journal under the pseudonym of Unus de Multis that blasted the‘Creed of the Future’ as promulgated by ‘Modern Prophets’. Though this new creed had ‘not yet been put into any formal shape’, Allingham believed that it would be tantamount to atheistic materialism. Science, Allingham complained, was sweeping away all religious faith. For the modern prophets, among whom he included scientists such as T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall and W. K. Clifford, grounded their obnoxious creed on the assumption that ‘physical science is competent to deal with the total contents of human experience; the truth being that these our Prophets translate every experience into materialistic formulae’. In the past, atheism could only be found ‘skulking’ in a ‘cheap newspaper and dingy discussion hall’. For the first time in the history of modern civilization, Allingham warned, ‘ATHEISM is publicly and authoritatively inculcated’ in ‘schools, classes, lectures to working-men, lectures to the fashionable world, Sunday afternoon discourses, “lay-sermons” of all sorts, books and periodicals addressed to people of every rank and every degree of culture’. But what bothered Allingham even more than the unprecedented public expression of atheism was the lack of any strong reaction against it.

Logical Positivism was a dominant paradigm in twentieth-century philosophy: it shaped ‘virtually every significant result obtained in the philosophy of science between the 1920s and 1950’. Logical Positivism was itself a narrow technical expression of more general philosophical sensibilities associated with the Positivist Movement which first emerged in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This movement mingled with the English Whig tradition in political and general history, leading to the idea that the history of science consists in a progressive, teleological struggle between the inexorable agents of cognitive progress and their reactionary opponents. Whig historiographical sensibilities endorsed the positivist view of science as a unitary domain of value-free knowledge, hermetically sealed from metaphysics by the operation of an algorithmic method of inquiry. The mingling of these philosophical and historiographical sensibilities resulted in the hybrid, positivist-Whig historiography of science, which had a long and powerful influence on our understanding of the Chemical Revolution. This chapter relates this influence to variations, within a shared metaphysical framework, on the idea of a unique and defining method of scientific inquiry. It delineates the components of this hybrid historiography – positivism and whiggism – and relates them to deeper and broader philosophical influences associated with the essentialist doctrine of knowledge as inscribed in the nature of things and the historicist notion of an inherent logic of history.

The previous chapter examined the style of analysis:synthesis and touched on its relationship with compound individuality. This chapter looks more closely at the neurosciences between 1830 and 1845, in which analysis progressively disintegrated the nervous system. One example was the emergence of the reflex arc. Fields to be examined include orthodox topics such as neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, and heterodox ones like phrenology. Neuroscientists saw animals as disunified when trying to answer certain analytic questions: what were the nervous elements that made up volition? Was there a central ‘seat’ in which these nervous elements were combined? If so, where was it; and if it was removed, what happened to the rest of the body? Lower animals seemed to lack the same mental characteristics as higher ones, such as volition – so how did their body parts move? Why did these parts often display an independent agency? If one denied a central coordinating location for nervous elements in lower animals, then how did these quasi-independent body parts act harmoniously?

Analytically-minded neuroscientists were therefore faced with the problematic of collective action. How could they reconcile the seeming independence of body parts with their harmonious contribution to the good of the entire individual? To answer such a question, different images were used. Body parts were seen as parts of a musical instrument, or they were depicted as linked by the ‘telegraph wires’ of the nerves. But the most common tactic was to see body parts as members of a social system, cooperating with (or being forced to cooperate with) other parts. Victorian life researchers were using similar tactics to those used by contemporary economists and political philosophers. Just as a society could be disintegrated into myriad individuals – each with their own interests – so too could an individual organism be seen as though it was a group of parts.

Neurophysiology as Analysis: Vivisections

Historian William Randall Albury portrays Bichat and François Magendie as analysts, French researchers who saw an organism's life as the sum of its independent parts.

This account of the historical geographies of science in nineteenth-century Cornwall begins, perhaps surprisingly, in 1728. In February of that year a young rector by the name of William Borlase made a chance discovery of a bronze-age urn in a barrow on Castle-an-Dinas hill in his own parish of Ludgvan, near Penzance, in west Cornwall. He duly reported this find to Thomas Tonkin, a local antiquary. This discovery awakened Borlase's interest in the cultural and natural histories of his own county – an interest he pursued until his death in 1772 – and that impelled him to seek connections with persons of similar interests. Borlase has since become an emblem for a particular sort of provincial scholar – often referred to as the ‘clerical naturalist’ – in eighteenth-century England, as well as, in some fields of inquiry at least, a figure who was at the forefront of scientific debates at a national level.

At a county level it has been argued that Borlase was really the only person who was pursuing intellectual inquiry to any serious degree in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall and by extension has been positioned as the progenitor of science in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Whether this latter claim is actually true is not of concern here. The fact that researchers in the fields of meteorology, natural history, antiquarianism and geology in nineteenth-century Cornwall all saw Borlase as their intellectual forefather means that it is imperative that he is introduced here. It is also useful to begin with Borlase because the agendas he set with regards to the operations of science in the provinces as well as to the scientific study of place were markedly different to those that were pursued in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Cornwall. In other words, Borlase helps us to reflect on the particular ways in which science in Victorian Cornwall was carried out.

This chapter begins by discussing the provincial ‘clerical naturalists’ of the eighteenth century and their motivation for conducting studies of their home counties and the means by which they did so.