All scientists now: the Royal Society in the nineteenth century

Abstract

Marie Boas Hall, All scientists now: the Royal Society in the nineteenth century , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 261, £25.00. ISBN: 0-521-26746-3. The effort and meticulous scholarship which characterized Hall’s studies of 17th century science and which (together with the work of her husband) transformed the study of the Scientific Revolution and laid the foundations for current studies of this period, have been utilized in this history of the Royal Society in the 19th century. As with her work on Henry Oldenburg and the formative years of the Royal Society in the 17th century, she has found in the 19th century a period of extraordinary interest. The study opens with the Society, unbeknown to itself, only half way through the Presidency of Joseph Banks. The Society’s Fellowship comprised those who were what we would now call scientists (though few professionals) and those who were interested in natural knowledge either intellectually or for practical purposes - there being a very strong contingent of Admiralty and Naval Fellows who were closely connected with Banks’s patronage. When the study ends, in 1899, the Society was composed mainly of professional scientists. The first half of the book shows how this change was wrought by professional scientists consciously striving to exclude those Fellows representing broader cultural interests - thereby depriving the Society of many non-scientists who would, like their predecessors, have been useful Fellows in forging links between the Society and other parts of society. Thus the election of the Duke of Sussex against John Herschel for President in 1830 is well discussed, as is the subsequent reform movement leading up to the change of the Statutes in 1847. The second half of the book is devoted to discussing what the Society did, apart from act as a meeting place for Fellows to learn about each others’ work. This concentrates on the encouragement of science (and of scientific exploration), relations with other learned societies and with the government. It is in these latter two subjects that the chief motors propelling the Society to restrict membership almost entirely to practising scientists are to be found.