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The Scientists' Declaration: Reflexions on Science and Belief in the Wake of Essays and Reviews, 1864–5
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man (1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia (1864), and Swinburne's notorious Atalanta in Calydon (1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.
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References
NOTES
1 Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church (London, 1970), Part II, p. 3.Google Scholar
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78 The overall median age of the signatory Fellows in 1865 was 62; on average they were within fifteen years of their deaths.
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81 Officer in Bengal Engineers; wrote miscellaneous scientific papers in India (Boase).
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86 Nottingham surgeon and temperance advocate, who wrote on tritons, tadpoles, and frogs (Boase).
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88 Zoologist and Vice-President of Zoological Society (Boase).
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103 Lyons, in The Royal Society, op. cit. (73), calculated that of the 630 Fellows in 1860, 330 could be considered scientific; and that of that number approximately 8 per cent were chemists, 10 per cent geologists, and 36 per cent in medicine. Of the 48 Fellows who could be described as ‘scientific’ 15 per cent were interested in chemistry, 9 per cent in geology, and 32 per cent in medicine.
104 Botanist and agriculturalist, edited Annals of natural history; devout Presbyterian. See Nature, cix (1922), 787–8Google Scholar, and Who was who, 1916–1928.
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111 S. P. Barchett.
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