Victorian science Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Science and Public Policy 27 (2000), 45-6.

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- Cultural History, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, History of Science

In the following paper, an account of Charles Darwin’s ideas on the topic of animal mind and its evolution is provided. After a survey of Darwin’s reflections on the relationship between instincts and intelligence from the “Notebooks” to “On the Origin of Species”, it is suggested that Darwin’s latest inquiry on the subject was partly influenced by the harsh criticisms expressed by St. George Mivart in his anonymous review of “The Descent of Man”. More precisely, Darwin’s search for a criterion of intelligence as express in “The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Earthworms” (1881) might have been an attempt to avoid some of the weaknesses emphasized by Mivart. Finally, it is documented how and to what extent Darwin’s treatment of the intelligence of earthworms owed some debt to George Romanes’ research on mental evolution.

The topic of my Ph.D. dissertation is the debate over the origin of animal instincts in nineteenth-century Britain. I focus on the emergence of the evolutionary explanations of animal mind, in close comparison with the previously prevailing perspective of natural theology. In dealing with authors such as Erasmus Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and George Romanes, I emphasise the complexity of the relationship between evolutionary thought and natural theology. Following the most recent scholarship, I assume that natural theology was by no means the uniform paradigm it was once believed to be. One of the chapters of my thesis is devoted to illustrating the variety of opinions held by natural theologians on the subject of animal mind in the first half of the century. I show how natural theology was rather receptive towards the hypothesis of animal intelligence at the time, occasionally even endorsing the belief that between the mind of humans and that of animals there is only a difference of degree. Also, some authors are discussed who conjectured that new instincts could be acquired by animals as a result of domestication and then passed on to the offspring – a sort of ‘Lamarckism’, so to say, confined to domestic species. The acceptance of such radical hypotheses is accounted for in the light of the general attempt of British natural theology to assimilate the most recent scientific findings within a theologically sustainable framework. As a result of this attempt, the views of natural theology with regard to animal psychology at the time were not necessarily hostile to those of evolutionary thinking, providing on the contrary a number of working-hypotheses which would prove helpful for the development of later evolutionary psychologies (including Darwin’s). I also contend that the idea of instincts as a kind of ‘intelligence’ – which was rather common among evolutionary theorists at the time – is best accounted for by reference to the conception which had long held sway among natural theologians, namely the notion that instincts are a kind of intelligence which cannot be ascribed to animals, being nothing but a particular instance of God’s intelligent plan. My claim is that the emphasis of evolutionists on the intelligent character of instincts – as in the notion of ‘lapsed intelligence’, formulated by George Lewes in the early 1870s and later explored by Romanes – was due to the natural-theological background that still permeated the scientific culture of their time.

An analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmesian Canon in the light of the scientific theorizations of his time is here proposed, aimed at highlighting how they shape the use of Gothic spatial tropes in the representation of London. The city, seen in its double capacity of capital of the Empire and positivistic rational environment, is internally disrupted in many of its facets, from the microcosm of the house, to the urban fabric, to the composition of its social body. Introduced by deviant individuals or polluting substances, the atavistic or degenerative threat invades the metropolis, materializing the anxieties underlying the late Victorian psyche: the persistence of the past in the present, and the possibility of reversion. The detective, armed with the tools that rationality and the scientific method itself offer, is tasked with the almost impossible duty of fighting Nature with its own means: his taxonomical organization of London is the ultimate attempt at normalising what eschews categorisation. Yet in so doing, he also reveals the contradictions and disruptions of the society he is trying to protect, effectively disclosing the very items it wishes to repress. Among the many disturbances that rippled through the purportedly smooth surface of Victorian and Edwardian life, scientific advancement and the consequential development of a scientistic mindset were two of the most pervasive and uncanny. Innovative means of communication consolidated Britain's position as head of an empire, immensely speeding the trading of goods and people with the most remote outskirts of its dominions and the exchange of information both at a domestic and at an international level. At the same time, they also rendered the "motherland" permeable to centripetal forces forever altering its sense of wholeness and unblem-ished isolation. New scientific (or pseudo-scientific) theorizations escalated, rather than rationalized , this profound unease, offering perhaps the greatest shock to Victorian psyche.

- by Camilla Del Grazia
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- Gothic Literature, Crime fiction, Detective Fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle

Darwin’s first publication after the Origin of Species was a volume on orchids that expanded on the
theory of adaptation through natural selection introduced in his opus. Here I argue that On the Various
Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862) is not merely an
empirical confirmation of his theory. In response to the immediate criticisms of his metaphor of natural
selection in the Origin, Darwin uses Orchids to present adaptation as the result of innumerable natural
laws rather than discrete acts analogous to conscious choices. The means of selection among polliniferous
plants cannot be neatly classed in the Origin’s terms of artificial, natural, or sexual selection. Along with
Darwin’s exploration of sexual selection in his later works, Orchids serves to undo the restrictive
metaphor so firmly established by the Origin and to win over those of Darwin’s contemporaries who were
committed advocates of natural law but suspicious of evolution by natural selection.

- by Kathryn Tabb
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- Botany, Evolutionary Biology, Victorian Studies, History and Philosophy of Biology

The chapter analyses H. G. Wells’s characterization of the The Time Machine’s protagonist and narrator, the Time Traveller, whose story serves as part of Wells’s broader strategy for criticising late Victorian modalities of science communication to non-specialist audiences. The Traveller’s ability to translate his scientific expertise into economic and social mobility is accompanied by ‘gift of speech’ which positions him as a potential popularizer of scientific knowledge. Wells addresses this capacity in his narrative of the future, which is embedded in late Victorian cultural discourses founded on misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As a scientist who fails to distance himself from popular fallacies about evolution, the Traveller’s persona reflects deep frustration with widespread misunderstandings of science: a frustration which Wells concurrently expressed in his journalism.

- by Anahita Rouyan
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- Literature And Science, Science journalism, H. G. Wells, Victorian science
- by Martyn Everett
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- Botany, Zoology, Victorian Studies, History of Natural History

It is generally believed in the scientific community that no changes in the physical concept space occurred during the period of time just before the onset of the Second Scientific Revolution except for Mach’s successful logical argument against the possibility of Newton’s absolute space. This belief is untrue. The concept of space in general and absolute space in particular was undergoing a complete rehabilitation during the era. The proliferation of new wave of aether theories that were initiated by Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory were merely a side issue to the question of absolute space. This scenario fits well the foregone conclusions that Newtonian science had reached its zenith but had begun to stagnate. The stagnation was marked by wild speculations regarding the aether that were being thrown around the scientific community prior to the coming revolution. Therefore, when experiments to detect the aether failed and explanations of the emission spectra of atoms and molecules could not be explained within the Newtonian paradigm, the next logical step was the scientific revolution. At least this is the general story of late nineteenth century physics that is perpetuated by the early winners of the Second Scientific Revolution. This story is necessary to demonstrate the corruptness of the Newtonian paradigm with regard to the new physics and show how the new physics of the twentieth century is superior to the Newtonian paradigm. So this story is grossly incomplete on many issues if not outright untrue.

- by Rebecka Klette
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- Victorian Studies, Physiognomy, Victorian cultural studies, History of Physiognomy
- by Donna Roberts
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- Human Evolution, Aesthetics, Art History, Art Theory

William Kingdon Clifford is famous for statements that he made in 1870 to the effect that matter is nothing but ripples, hills and bumps of space curved in a higher dimension and the motion of matter is nothing more than variations in that curvature. For having said this Clifford has been both hailed and condemned for having anticipated Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The standard view of historians, scholars and scientists is that his ideas were not tenable at the time, he never developed or wrote down his theory (if he ever had one), and he had no followers or students to carry on his work. Nothing is further from the truth on all three counts. Modern scholars have failed to recognize Clifford’s theory because they have only been looking for Einstein’s gravity theory in the 1870s, which is based on tensors, while tensor calculus was not developed until decades after Clifford’s untimely and
unfortunate early death from consumption in 1879. So they are wrong on both counts. Those scholars who have even bothered to look at the original literature on the subject have been unable to find Clifford’s published but incomplete theory because he was forced to develop his own mathematical system of biquaternions to model motion as it would appear in the higher-dimensional space. Nor was Clifford seeking a
new theory of gravity, but rather a more coherent and intuitive portrayal of his friend Maxwell’s new electromagnetic theory. However, Clifford believed that dynamical forces in three-dimensional space reduced to kinematical motions in four-dimensional space and therefore planned to include a new theory of gravity after he polished off electromagnetism. In other words, Clifford was trying to develop a unified field theory that would more consistently look like modern day unifications rather than just an earlier version of general relativity.

The history of science has often been viewed from the perspective of separating the logical and reasonable explanations of our world from supernatural, occult and superstitious views of nature. In a very real sense, part of the progress attributed to the rise of science has come as the result of an endeavor to winnow superstition out of the human worldview as well as culturally and philosophically limit all the other qualities, events and phenomena associated with the supernatural and occult. Within this context, there have been lesser skirmishes as well as greater periods of open warfare between science and religion, especially in those cases where various religious practices still propagate superstition and the supernatural. However, there is growing evidence that some aspects of the scientific and religious worldviews are converging and that trend is highly evident within the realm of valid scientific studies of the paranormal.

There have been attempts to subsume Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution under either one of two distinct intellectual traditions: early Victorian natural science and its descendants in political economy (as exemplified by Herschel, Lyell, or Malthus) and the romantic approach to art and science emanating from Germany (as exemplified by Humboldt and Goethe). In this paper, it will be shown how these traditions may have jointly contributed to the design of Darwin’s theory. The hypothesis is that their encounter created a particular tension in the conception of his theory which first opened up its characteristic field and mode of explanation. On the one hand, the domain of the explanandum was conceived of under a holistic and aesthetic view of nature that, in its combination with refined techniques of observation, was deeply indebted to Humboldt in particular. On the other hand, Darwin fashioned explanations for natural phenomena, so conceived, so as to identify their proper causes in a Herschelian spirit. The particular interaction between these two traditions in Darwin, it is concluded, paved the way for a transfer of the idea of causal laws to animate nature while salvaging the romantic idea of a complex, teleological and harmonious order of nature.

- by Hajo Greif
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- German Romanticism, Aesthetics Of Nature, Science and Romanticism, Teleology
- by Juan Manuel Rodríguez Caso
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- Victorian science, Alfred Russel Wallace

Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen's contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen's popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.

- by Beth Mills
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- Victorian Studies, History of Science, Victorian Literature, Science Fiction

On the Jubjub bird and on Charles Darwin and evolution being possibly addressed in Lewis Carroll's and Henry Holiday's "The Hunting of the Snark". --- 1st: 2015-01-01, update (minor changes): 2015-01-02 19:07 UTC. --- Errata (corrected on 2015-01-08): I used the Name "Dodgson" without having explained, that "Lewis Carroll" was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. --- 2015-10-19: More info on the source of Darwin's portrait. --- 2015-12-13: Raymond Schumann told me (related to Page 5, line 155): "The Victorians made morning calls in the afternoon."
https://www.google.de/search?q=The+Victorians+made+morning+calls+in+the+afternoon --- 2016-02-08: Additional image at bottom of page 1. --- 2016-02-20: Carroll's/Dodgson's obsession with time. --- 2016-03-12: Removal of empty page. Illustration by Grandeville added.

Con la pubblicazione di The Origin of Species, nel 1859, le teorie di Charles Darwin s’impongono all’attenzione della scienza contemporanea, scuotendo dalle fondamenta l’episteme vittoriana. Oltre un decennio dopo, il naturalista dà alle stampe un’opera alla cui stesura aveva dedicato anni di instancabile lavoro e tuttavia meno nota: The Descent of Man non è soltanto il racconto delle origini dell’uomo, come preannunciato dal titolo, ma anche e soprattutto la lunga e complessa storia della differenza sessuale, una questione all’epoca sempre più discussa, in concomitanza con l’emergere sulla scena politica e nel dibattito culturale della cosiddetta New Woman. A partire dall’idea di natura femminile, così come essa si va definendo nell’universo darwiniano e nel discorso scientifico del tempo, questo studio traccia quattro percorsi di poesia attraverso le opere di tre scrittrici vittoriane ancora poco considerate dalla critica. Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind e Amy Levy, confrontandosi direttamente con gli assunti della scienza, delineano i contorni di una femminilità nuova, ripensando i modelli del passato e immaginando un futuro diverso per la donna, in una società in rapido cambiamento alle soglie del Novecento.

- by Lara Karpenko and +1
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- Victorian Studies, History of Science, Victorian cultural studies, Pseudoscience

The article explores the evolution of the discourse of taste during the XVIII and XIX centuries, adopting the categories of pure and impure as paradigmatic keys to the subject. Reyn-olds' standards of aesthetic judgement, and the voices of Hogarth and Richard Payne Knight, mark the drive towards taste as subjective response. Thus young Marianne Dashwood can judge whether Edward Ferrars' taste is pure or impure. Taste, despite Hazlitt's warnings, becomes synonymous with fashion, and fashion is an impure element, conditioned by new technologies, allowing the manufacture of endless replicas from original art works. The Great Exhibition is the pivotal event that consecrates the productions of industry, commerce and art. Such triangulation thrives on the scientific progress of chemistry, which presides over the offer of new materials, colours, printing techniques, Parian marble, electroplated metal, allowing all kinds of cheap imitations. John Ruskin comments upon the triumphant progress of chemistry: and often uses analogies or metaphors taken from this science in order to explain the obscure processes of the artist's associative imagination. Purity of taste – or its impure connections with chemical works and their products – are discussed by Ruskin. But the paradigm pure/impure is also relevant to the work of Victorian art critics. Walter Pater and Vernon Lee recur to chemistry in order to explain the mysteries of the subjective response to art. Writers follow, such as Collins and Stevenson, who weld the strange mixture of pure and impure elements in human nature to chemistry, and thus place on the epistemic horizon of this science the fundamental questions of their age.

- by Francesca Orestano
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- Aesthetics, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature, Walter Pater

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

- by Nicoletta Pireddu
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- British Literature, Intellectual History, Cultural History, Cultural Studies

This is the fascinating story of William Kingdon Clifford, a Cambridge mathematician and geometer who tried to develop a unified field theory based on a Riemannian geometry several decades before Einstein. He died the same year Einstein was born. His theory accounted for both electromagnetism and gravity more than a century before theories of everything (TOEs) became popular in science. Yet he was talking about the same thing, although he did not use the term quantum to describe the microscopic world of physics. Instead he developed a new point-based geometry of biquaternions and twists to explain curved space and physical phenomena. As early as 1870, Clifford stated that matter was merely curved space and the motion of matter was no more than ripples or waves across that curvature. This was almost a century before Einstein developed the general theory of relativity which makes the same claim. But Clifford thought in grander terms and meant all types of motion while Einstein only used the concept of space-time curvature to explain gravitational motion. Clifford was a philosopher, mathematician and physicist who is well remembered in history for his purely mathematical accomplishments, but equally well forgotten for his greatest accomplishments in the physical application of his mathematical systems. His “space-theory of matter” is considered no more than an “untenable” speculation that pre-dated Einstein’s later discovery. Paradoxically, the closer present science comes to unifying the quantum and relativity, the closer it comes to realizing some of Clifford’s original concepts regarding the curvature of space.

Science fiction has been around for about one hundred and fifty years as a specialized form of literature, although individual scattered stories that could be classified as science fiction date back at least several hundred years. Science fiction is usually characterized by the inclusion of scientific material as an essential component of the plot or premise of the story. It can also be argued that science fiction of any given era reflects the state of science and scientific speculation at that time. In the case of H.G. Wells, writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fictional stories he wrote actually covered the gamut of physical uses of which the fourth dimension was suspected during the Victorian era. The fourth dimension was thought by some to house either ghosts or god and angels, depending upon one’s beliefs. By others of more scientific bent, it was thought that the fourth dimension may be time or the universe was a time-space. The most curious of Wells’ stories told of an angel that fell from a fourth dimension where there was no gravity. Yet it wasn’t until 1905 the Einstein used time as the fourth dimension and not until 1915 when Einstein associated curvature with gravity. Was Wells prescient in writing these stories? No. He was merely reflecting the science of his era and the popularity of hyperspace theories, which should offer a good lesson for historians and scientists who claim that the concept of hyperspaces only became popular after Einstein’s discoveries.

- by Andrew Kidd
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- Evolutionary Biology, Visual Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Science, Evolution

In 1866 the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was founded with George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll (1823 – 1900) as first president, and patron, who served in this post for 30 years. The purpose of the society was to further the study of aerial navigation as well as to make aeronautics a respectable science, and today the society - now the Royal Aeronautical Society – serves as a professional body dedicated to the aerospace research. There were two fundamental areas of scientific knowledge key to the society in its initial decades: 1) a detailed understanding of the principles of bird flight and 2) the practical application of that knowledge in the construction of flying machines. Argyll firmly belonged to the former being a well-seasoned ornithologist and theorist of flight, and, with the publication of his best-selling book The Reign of Law (1867), was one of the first to popularize the theoretical principles of bird flight. In this paper, I will examine the relationship between bird and mechanical flight through Argyll's ornithological studies with a critical focus on the various factors early in life that led to his eventual position as president of the Aeronautical Society. By analysing the influence of his family relations, home environment and religious convictions, I show how Argyll’s scientific undertakings existed as part of a wider network of theistic Victorian aristocrats who contributed to the creation and professionalisation of scientific disciplines in a way that contrasted markedly with the methods of many of the scientific naturalists.

- by Nathan Bossoh
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- Ornithology, Science and Religion, Country House History, Victorian science

In the following note I address the figure of the British theologian and mathematician Baden Powell (1796-1860), by drawing on an important monograph by Prof. Pietro Corsi recently published in Italian. Powell’s work responded to a cultural strategy of assimilation of philosophical and scientific novelties within a fundamentally conservative view of society. Here, I provide a brief sketch of Powell’s attempt to rethink natural theology in the light of the latest scientific hypotheses, including those regarding the evolution of living beings.

In 1972 a historian of science, Arthur I. Miller made and to his own specifications proved the startling claim the old story that J.K.F. Gauss attempted to measure space curvature from the tops of three mountains in Hannover in the 1820s was a myth. Miller further implied, quite strongly, that the story was generated after the development of general relativity to make a stronger historical case for Einstein’s adoption of the radical notion of space curvature. Miller’s revisionist approach to a real historical event was not only capricious, but dead wrong, as were his implications. The story of Miller’s myth may have put to rest and ended at the time with a few simple and accurate criticisms, but the problem he raised has had a nasty habit of reasserting itself within the scientific community every few years. New deniers crop up from time to time because no one has been able to give a definitive answer on the subject. It seems that Miller’s conjecture, itself a myth, is merely the symptom of a much greater historical malady: The denial that non-Euclidean and especially Riemannian geometries could have been used in physics before Einstein’s successful application of Riemannian curvature to explain gravity in 1915. Nothing could be further from the truth. Non-Euclidean geometries and hyperspaces were used to speculate upon the true nature of space and its relationship to various physical phenomena and the subject debated quite extensively in the last decades of the nineteenth century, just prior to the Second Scientific Revolution. Not only was the story about Gauss true and well known within the scientific and scholarly communities, but astronomers at the time were actively using stellar parallax measurements to determine if space were indeed curved or not. The subject is still of great and timely importance in physics, because it indicates that little is really known, at least not as much as historians and scientists would have us believe is known, about the state of theoretical research in physics prior to the Second Scientific Revolution.

The fictionalizing of science happens to be a meta-theme in Middlemarch, and one which, I argue, George Eliot sets out consciously and masterfully to interrogate. In the process, I hope to show that Eliot's use of science is far from naive or merely syncretic. To the contrary, I argue that in Middlemarch Eliot actually anticipates a greater discursive shift in scientific theory of which Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (l962) is the watermark in the philosophy of science, and which Michel Foucault marks and notes in his various archaeologies of knowledge. (Click on link, above.)

- by Michael Rectenwald
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- Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, New Historicism, History of Science

How do scientific institutions shape visual culture? Why, and under what historical conditions , have scientific organizations in history emerged as prominent patrons of visual communication? This paper investigates the nature and significance of the contributions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to the development in Britain of new visual methods of scientific inquiry and their public dissemination during the first hundred years after its founding, in 1831. While the legacy of the British Association for the Advancement of Science has been studied extensively, the specifically visual dimension of its work has not been the subject of significant focus. Drawing upon several examples of its activities, the paper addresses how and why the BAAS, with its heterogeneous and far-flung membership, became active in British scientific visual culture. From the support it provided for pioneering photographic experiments to its advocacy of graphic methods and its public exhibitions of scientific documentary cinema, the BAAS served as a catalyst for the transformation of modern British visual history. The essay concludes by offering some thoughts on historiography and avenues for further research.

- by Jennifer Tucker
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- Victorian science

This article proposes that, in her later writings, George Eliot’s thinking developed considerably beyond a simple rejection of religion as “self-deception” and began to make wider philosophical explorations of a range of viewpoints. Instead of drawing on her much-celebrated novels, the article examines two of the shorter poems from the last decade of her life: “A Minor Prophet” and “I Grant You Ample Leave.” These works represent poetic continuations of her rationalist crusade against what she described as the general reader’s “spongy texture of mind”, and demonstrate her uniquely personal, informed, and satirical response to emerging contemporary sciences, the whims of pseudo-intellectual fashions, and the implications of both for atheism.

- by Stella Pratt-Smith
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, English Literature, Atheism
- by Bri Bartuccio
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- Dreams, Victorian science, Mania, Depression and Melancholy

- by Federico Morganti
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- History of Science and Technology, History of Ideas, Art, History of Science

Examining “The Law of Help” and “Of Leaf Beauty” from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters V (1860), this paper argues that Ruskin used both botany and aesthetics to pursue an organic conception of organisation and creativity, and attempted to articulate a vision of harmonious order that could be equally applicable to art, politics, and society. Ruskin’s belief that composition consisted in the mutualistic relationships of parts within a whole was founded on his reading of environment, and then applied to human concerns, making his work a site of proto-ecological and biocentric enquiry, but at the same time his natural history was also marked by commitment to anthropocentric notions of hierarchy and design. The co-existence of these competing visions of environment made Ruskin’s natural history a realm of tension and unresolved conflict, but also generated a unique conceptualisation of nature that he sought to apply to politics. Through the botanical narratives of “Of Leaf Beauty” Ruskin created the most extended and profound of his social-environmental analogies, insisting that the “building” of trees rested on the sustained fellowship of leaves who are guided by an innate sense of duty, purpose, and co-operation. An extended exemplar of the Law of Help in action, ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ was motivated by clear political purpose. By analysing Ruskin’s later political work – in the theoretical realm of Unto This Last (1862) and in the practical arena of the Guild of St. George – I argue that the imprint of the dual impulse of his natural history is writ large in his social thought. I also suggest that he was unable to translate the unreflexive communitarianism of the tree communities of ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ into the field of utopian praxis, and that the Guild was caught between commitments to hierarchy and to decentralised interdependence.

In the following article I provide a brief analysis of George J. Romanes’ conception of intelligence and its relationship with instincts. Through a careful reading of some keypassages from Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) – Romanes’ chief work on the subject – I endeavour to show how the very notion of intelligence was related, in Romanes’ thought, to individual adaptation to the environmental novelty. Also, I attempt to clarify in what sense, according to Romanes, this capacity was to be included among the factors of organic evolution. Lastly, I compare Romanes’ view with that expressed in Darwin’s last book, i.e. The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881). I contend that the two scientists basically shared the same conception of the relationship between instincts and intelligence, which accounted not only for the need of phylogenetic continuity, but also for that of discontinuity due to adaptive divergence.

- by Katherine D Watson
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- History of Science, Victorian science, Scientific Expertise
- by Michael Rectenwald
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- Chemistry, Victorian Studies, Historiography, History of Science

Geology was an emerging science in the nineteenth century, over which it developed significantly, from the naming of a group of extinct animals as dinosaurs, to the increasing acceptance that the earth was significantly older than the Bible indicated. Geological writing similarly developed throughout this period, with male writers publishing scientific papers and popularizing works to sate public appetite for the new science. Women faced restrictions in both researching and writing about the novel discipline, but made significant contributions to the field and the literature; this entry on British Geology provides an overview of the context in which women wrote on the subject, a survey of the modes in which women were most frequently published, and functions as a foothold to further research by spotlighting specific authors in brief.

- by Verity Burke
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- Geology, Women's Studies, Science Communication, Victorian Studies

Darwin's first publication after the Origin of Species was a volume on orchids that expanded on the theory of adaptation through natural selection introduced in his opus. Here I argue that On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862) is not merely an empirical confirmation of his theory. In response to immediate criticisms of his metaphor of natural selection, Darwin uses Orchids to present adaptation as the result of innumerable natural laws, rather than discrete acts analogous to conscious choices. The means of selection among polliniferous plants cannot be neatly classed under the Origin's categories of artificial, natural, or sexual selection. Along with Darwin's exploration of sexual selection in his later works, Orchids serves to undo the restrictive metaphor so firmly established by the Origin and to win over those of Darwin's contemporaries who were committed advocates of natural law but suspicious of evolu...

- by Kathryn Tabb
- •
- Botany, Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy, Victorian Studies