Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T23:10:44.766Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Presidential Address†: Getting science across

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

David Knight
David Knight
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

‘Read until you hear the voices’; so the maxim goes for those who would engage with the Victorians. Let us try with Thomas Henry Huxley:

A great chapter in the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 129 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Huxley, T. H., Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, 6th edn, London, 1877, 176–7.Google Scholar

2 Berkeley, G., ‘Siris’, in The Works, 3 vols., London, 1820, iii, 259–418Google Scholar; a journey from the ridiculous to the sublime.

3 Desmond, A., Huxley: The Devil's Disciple, London, 1994, especially chs. 14–17.Google Scholar For Vestiges, see 193.

4 On science lecturing in the eighteenth century, see the special issue of BJHS (1995), 28, pt 1.Google Scholar

5 Nelson to the Duke of Clarence, 10 December 1792, in Nelson and Emma (ed. Hudson, R.), London, 1994, 74f.Google Scholar

6 Golinski, J., Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820, Cambridge, 1992, 93ff.Google Scholar

7 Priestley, J., Heads of Lectures on a Course of Experimental Philosophy, Particularly Including Chemistry… [1794], reprint, New York, 1970.Google Scholar

8 Varley, E. A., The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement ofti Early 19th Century, Cambridge, 1992, ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Corsi, P., Science and Religion, Cambridge, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Fitzpatrick, M., ‘Priestley in caricature’, in Oxygen and the Conversion of Future Feedstocks, Royal Society of Chemistry Special Publication no. 48, London, 1984, 347–69Google Scholar; Carter, H. B. (ed.), The Sheep and Wool Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, London, 1979, 211.Google Scholar

10 Knight, D. M., ‘Sir Joseph Banks: Mr Science, 1778–1820’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (1995), 20, 121–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Schofield, R. E., A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, 1733–1804, Cambridge, MA, 1966, 313.Google Scholar

12 Knight, D. M., Humphry Davy: Science and Power, Oxford, 1992, 119–20.Google Scholar

13 Berman, M., Social Change and Scientific Organization; the Royal Institution 1799–1844, London, 1978, ch. 2.Google Scholar

14 Smith, J., Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, Madison, 1994, 78.Google Scholar

15 Desmond, , op. cit. (3).Google Scholar

16 I explore this in my essay, ‘From science to wisdom’, in Telling Lives in Science (ed. Shortland, M. and Yeo, R.), Cambridge, forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 See the Introduction to the Quarterly Journal of Science (1864), 1, especially 11f., 22Google Scholar; Abbri, F., ‘Romanticism versus Enlightenment: Sir Humphry Davy's idea of chemical philosophy’, in Romanticism in Science (ed. Poggi, S. and Bossi, M.), Dordrecht, 1994, 31–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, , op. cit. (14), 231Google Scholar; Lightman, B., The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge, Baltimore, 1987, 148f.Google Scholar; and Knight, D. M., ‘Science and culture in mid-Victorian Britain’, Nuncius (1996), forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

18 Brooke, J. H., Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge, 1991, ch. 6.Google Scholar

19 Knight, D. M., ‘The application of enlightened philosophy’, in Sir Joseph Banks: A Global Perspective (ed. Banks, R. E. R. et al. ), London, 1994, 77–86.Google Scholar

20 Davy, H., Consolations in Travel, 5th edn, London, 1851, 256.Google Scholar

21 Bud, R. F. and Roberts, G. K., Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain, Manchester, 1984.Google Scholar

22 Knight, D. M., Ideas in Chemistry: A History of the Science, 2nd edn, London, 1995, ch. 8.Google Scholar

23 Paris, J. A., The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, London, 1831, 89.Google Scholar

24 Davy, H., Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher, London, 1830, 234.Google Scholar

25 Huxley, , op. cit. (1), 77Google Scholar (original lecture, 1854); Huxley's adjectives are both important, as Sir Andrew Huxley remarked to me.

26 Herschel, J., A Treatise on Astronomy, new edn, London, 1851, 5.Google Scholar

27 Golinski, , op. cit. (6), ch. 7.Google Scholar

28 Davy, , op. cit. (20), 239.Google Scholar

29 Davy, , op. cit. (20), 259f.Google Scholar

30 [Whately, R.], Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, [1819], 7th edn, London, 1841.Google Scholar

31 Davy, H., Collected Works, 9 vols., London, 1839–1840, viii, 313f.Google Scholar

32 Crosland, M. P., The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the time of Napoleon I, London, 1967, ch. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Shakespeare, , The Tempest, 4.1.151.Google Scholar

34 See Knight, D. M., ‘Tyrannies of distance in British science’, in International Science and National Scientific Identity (ed. Home, R. W. and Kohlstedt, S. G.), Dordrecht, 1991, 39–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 1 Kings 19:10; Isaiah 10:20–3.

36 Huxley, on Wilberforce, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (ed. Darwin, F.), 3 vols., London, 1887, ii, 322.Google Scholar

37 Davy, , op. cit. (31), vii, 15.Google Scholar

38 Pickering, M., Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, I, Cambridge, 1993, 245–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Cantor, G., Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist, London, 1991.Google Scholar

40 Tyndall, J., ‘Faraday as a discoverer’ [1868], reprinted in The Royal Institution Library of Science, Physical Sciences, 11 vols., London, 1970, ii, 66.Google Scholar

41 Rupke, N. A., Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, New Haven, 1994, 294ff.Google Scholar

42 ‘Comparative anatomy and classification’, Quarterly Journal of Science (1864), 1, 544.Google Scholar

43 Huxley, T. H., ‘Species and races and their origin’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution (1858–1862), 3, 195–200.Google Scholar

44 Desmond, , op. cit. (13), 267–70.Google Scholar

45 Tyndall, J., ‘The scientific use of the imagination’, in Fragments of Science, 2 vols., London, 1899, ii, 101–34.Google Scholar

46 Sharratt, M., Galileo: Decisive Innovator, Oxford, 1994, 118.Google Scholar

47 Huxley, , op. cit. (43), 199.Google Scholar

48 Huxley, , op. cit. (43), 200.Google Scholar For the verses, see Pfordresher, J. (ed.), A Variorum Edition of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, New York, 1973, 962.Google Scholar

49 Burkhardt, F., Porter, D. M., Browne, J. and Richmond, M. (eds.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 9 vols., Cambridge, 1985–1995, viii, 84.Google Scholar

50 Huxley, T. H., ‘The coming of age of the “Origin of Species”’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution (1879–1881), 9, 361–8.Google Scholar

51 Matthew 21: 42.

52 Huxley, T. H., Aphorisms and Reflections (ed. Huxley, H.), London, 1907, p. vi.Google Scholar

53 Huxley, T. H., Darwiniana, London, 1894, 303–475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Huxley, , op. cit. (1), 174–201.Google Scholar

55 Oscar Wilde's play was first performed in 1895.

56 Lightman, , op. cit. (17), 14.Google Scholar

57 Huxley, , op. cit. (53), 363ff.Google Scholar

58 E. R. Lankester, in the entry for Huxley in Freeman, R. B., Charles Darwin: A Companion, Folkestone, 1978, 170.Google Scholar

59 See, for example, Rudwick, M. J. S., Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World, Chicago, 1992.Google Scholar

60 Huxley, T. H., The Crayfish: An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, London, 1880, 317–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Huxley, , op. cit. (1), 199, 201.Google Scholar

62 Huxley, , op. cit. (1), 201.Google Scholar

63 Huxley, T. H., The Oceanic Hydrozoa, London, 1859.Google Scholar

64 Foster, M., in Huxley Memorial Lectures (ed. Lodge, O.), Birmingham, 1914, 36.Google Scholar

65 Tennyson, A., In Memoriam [1850] (ed. Shatto, S. and Shaw, M.), Oxford, 1982, 112Google Scholar (from section 95). Huxley admired the poet and this poem, especially its insight into scientific method: see Huxley, L., The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2nd edn, 3 vols., London, 1913, iii, 268ff.Google Scholar