‘Our’ included not only Hooker and Huxley but their fellow-members of the X-Club. ‘Our time’ had been the 1870s and early 1880s. For a five-year period from November 1873 to November 1878 Hooker had been President of the Society, Huxley one of the Secretaries, and fellow X-Club member, William Spottiswoode, the Treasurer. Hooker was followed in the Presidency by Spottiswoode, and on Spottiswoode's death in 1883 Huxley was elected President. During this period other X-Club members—Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, George Busk, (...) Sir John Lubbock, and Thomas Hirst—were ordinary members of the Council of the Society. As the Table below (p. 60) shows, there were at least three members of the X-Club on the Council of the Royal Society from November 1870 until November 1882. On eight occasions in this period there were four or more X-Club members on the Council. ‘Our time’ came to an end in 1885 when ill-health forced Huxley's retirement after only two years in the Presidency, and G. G. Stokes at last became President. (shrink)

The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and (...) institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors. (shrink)

My goals in this paper are twofold: to outline the refashioning of amateur and professional roles in life science in late Victorian Yorkshire, and to provide a revised historiography of the relationship between amateurs and professionals in this era. Some historical treatments of this relationship assume that amateurs were demoralized by the advances of laboratory science, and so ceased to contribute and were left behind by the autonomous "new biology." Despite this view, I show that many amateurs played a vital (...) part in the construction of a professional academic community in urban Yorkshire, and then continued to collaborate with the laboratory-based biologists. The key to any analysis of the relationship between amateurs and professionals is the great variety of amateur identities and practices in Victorian Yorkshire. The amateur-professional rift fallacy arose because laboratory biologists fashioned an identity in conscious opposition to a particular type of amateur: an ideal that belied an array of cooperative relationships. As naturalists refashioned their roles and identities in light of the changes within academe and without, debates about the practice and place of life science took place as often among amateurs as between professionals and amateurs. (shrink)

In Britain's development as the first industrial nation, the crucial importance of surveyors, mining engineers and geologists in prospecting and exploiting minerals and raw materials seems self-evident. Yet historians of geology have yet to take proper account of this aspect of geological science. Why is this ? One reason may simply be that the historiography of the subject itself is only relatively recent and many areas, besides industrial geology, await coverage. Or perhaps the nature of the source material is to (...) blame. While scientific geologists filled museums with their fossils and notebooks, engaged in well-publicized controversies of the day, and wrote numerous books and articles, industrial geologists often left relatively few papers and sometimes never published their results. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the neglect of economic geology may be due to a rapidly developing bias in the subject itself. A recent study has highlighted the fact that the history of British geology, as seen through the eyes of historians at least, appears to comprise two different but closely interconnected strands. The first relates to natural history and looks toward the scientific or ‘pure’ front; the second connects with mining and the search for raw materials and is slanted towards the industrial or ‘applied’ horizon. In the same way that the scientific branch of geology brought fame and fortune in Victorian times, so the protagonists of ‘pure’ geology have so far been the chief interest of historians – so much so that the literature so far lacks detailed case studies of the careers and work of applied geologists. (shrink)

The origin, character, and reception of the Development Act of 1909 are described. Extant evaluations of its historical significance are presented and criticized. It is claimed that the significance of the Act for the promotion of scientific research in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry has been largely overlooked. The way in which the Commissioners of the Act interpreted their brief by establishing scholarships, new research institutes, and developing existing institutes is described.

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching (...) from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time. (shrink)

A summary of revisionist accounts of the contextual meaning of "professional" and "amateur," as applied to the mid-Victorian X Club, is followed by an analysis of the liberal goals and inner tensions of this coalition of gentlemen specialists and government teachers. The changing status of amateurs is appraised, as are the new sites for the emerging laboratory discipline of "biology." Various historiographical strategies for recovering the women's role are considered. The relationship of science journalism to professionalization, and the constructive engagement (...) of X Club publicists with their empowering audiences, are discussed. Finally, the article assesses how far the content and boundary closure of "biology," forged by Thomas Henry Huxley, were related to 'professional' and political goals. Pure biology's social and medical roots are examined, and the way inter-professional and wider Darwinian conflicts resulted in a new lexicon of words for the X Clubbers around 1870, including "evolution" and "agnosticism," as well as "biology." Biology's role in the forging of British national identity is discussed, as are its relationship to the social strategies of liberal, Dissenting, and industrial groups in the country, whose authority sustained the new laboratory rhetoric. (shrink)