Thomas Henry Huxley Category

Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science

“Science,” writes Nicolaas Rupke, “is not just a collection of abstract theories and general truths but a concrete practice with spatial dimensions.” It is, indeed, “situated knowledge.” Rupke comes to this conclusion in an Afterword for David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers’ (eds.) Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (2011). The essays in this volume “situate […]

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Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009)

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 […]

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Charlotte Sleigh’s Literature and Science (2011)

Since my post on Huxley’s treatment of “Nature,” I have occupied my time with readings from Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2009) and Charlotte Sleigh’s Literature and Science (2011). Otis’ work is an anthology of over 500 pages of excerpts and explanatory notes. Sleigh’s work is a sustained argument about the […]

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T.H. Huxley’s Puzzling use of Nature

Thomas Henry Huxley’s (1825-1895) use of the term “Nature” was curiously inconsistent. According to Oma Stanley, in his “T.H. Huxley’s Treatment of ‘Nature’” (1957), “all discussions of Nature made before 1871, Huxley treated the subject from the romantic point of view; and that from 1876 onward, his attitude was scientific.” In 1869 Huxley had translated […]

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Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Secularism of George Jacob Holyoake

Wrapping up a series of essays I have been reading from The British Journal for the History of Science, I now come to two interrelated and complimentary essays by Ciaran Toal, “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Sermons, Secularization and the Rhetoric of Conflict in the 1870s” (2012), and Michael Rectenwald, […]

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Huxley, Agnosticism, and the X-Club

In assessing the “climate of opinion” in Victorian Britain, and more specifically the context of the evolution debates and narratives of conflict between science and religion that bolstered them, I have been engaging with a number of articles and books about prominent nineteenth-century dramatis personae, including Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, […]

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The God of Science on the Neck of her Enemies

Theology and Parsondom are in my mind the natural and irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe that we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 yrs, it is to see the God of Science on the necks of her enemies. Thomas […]

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John Tyndall and the “War” between Science and Religion

While scanning Linda Woodhead’s (ed.) Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001) yesterday, I found Gowan Dawson’s “Contextualizing the ‘War’ between Science and Religion” particularly enlightening. Dawson explores Victorian materialism as it was exemplified by polemicists like John Tyndall. While the confrontation between T.H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the British Association for the Advancement of […]

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Book History and the History of Science

This morning I began reading the “special section” collection of articles published in The British Journal for the History of Science, entitled “Book History and the Sciences” (2000). Jonathan R. Topham provides an introduction explaining why historians of science have been not a little skeptical about the value of the book history approach. “It is […]

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Wrestling with Nature – Science and the Public

The other essay I found particularly interesting is Bernard Lightman’s “Science and the Public.” It was in reviewing Mary Somerville’s popular work, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), when English polymath William Whewell (1794-1866) first coined the word “scientist,” used as a umbrella term to avoid the “endless subdivision of the physical sciences.” In […]

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