Charles Lyell Category
Visions of Science: Charles Lyell
Posted on January 3, 2015 4 Comments
James Secord opens his fifth chapter, which focuses on Charles Lyell’s (1797-1875) Principles of Geology (1830-33), by stating that geology had become the most contentious of the new sciences. But this requires some qualification. In Britain, where knowledge of the natural world was used to prove the existence, power, and wisdom of God, many leading […]
The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence
Posted on February 10, 2014 Leave a Comment
Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s The Triumph of Time (1966) is a “little book” with an enormous and exceedingly complex subject. It pretends to be no less than a survey of Victorians’ attitudes towards time. Buckley proposes to “test the truth” of John Stuart Mill’s suggestion, articulated in his The Spirit of the Ages (1831), that his own […]
Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009)
Posted on January 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
It is perhaps fitting that my 100th post on this blog should be Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009). My research began in September with historiographies of the Scientific Revolution, only to converge in recent months on nineteenth-century narratologies of “conflict” between religion and science, which, I believe, depended crucially […]