Over the last forty years several historians have drawn attention to aspects of the activities of lecturers on natural philosophy in Britain in the eighteenth century. Hans and others looked at the part these lecturers played in the development of education, particularly adult education. Musson and Robinson considered the possible connection between the work of the lecturers and the growth of industry, and Inkster and others have explored the relationship between lecturers and the institutions set up to support science, especially (...) around 1800.4 More recently, Schaffer has pointed to the parallels between the performances of the lecturers on natural philosophy and other contemporary cultural activities. As a consequence of these studies we know much more about the work of the lecturers, its significance, and, to a lesser extent, their relationship to their audience. (shrink)

It has become almost traditional for historians of geology to claim that Roderick Murchison ‘opened to view for the first time’ the fossiliferous rocks below the Old Red Sandstone which Murchison described in his monumental work The Silurian System published in 1839. Murchison himself claimed in the introduction to this work ‘no-one was previously aware of the existence below the Old Red Sandstone of a regular series of deposits, containing peculiar organic remains’. Professor John Phillips expressed the traditional view well (...) when he wrote of the larger area of which Shropshire forms a part: ‘practically before the Summer of 1831 the whole field of the ancient rocks and fossils… was unexplored but then arose two men… Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison and simultaneously set to work to cultivate what had been left a desert’. Against this we must set the statement of George B. Greenough , first president of the Geological Society of London, as reported in 1841. He had ‘frequently expressed a conviction, as a result of his own observations…, that adequate enquiry alone was wanting to prove the existence of a succession of strata in the west of England, and in Wales—not less regular than that which had been demonstrated in the centre and east of the Island.’. (shrink)

In the overwhelmingly public world of the twentieth century, science often seems simultaneously remote and ubiquitous. There are many complex reasons for this, of course, not the least being the capacity of technology for material transformation and the apparent inability of scientific discourse to communicate its practice to the unanointed. In some ways, our current predicament appears similar to that of the late eighteenth century when so many promises had already been made of what natural philosophy might accomplish, and when (...) many clamoured for access to the power of natural philosophical practice. At that point, on the verge of the stunning dislocations of the industrial revolution, many of the literate and mechanical public took considerable steps to bridge the gap otherwise policed by social distinction. (shrink)