Essay review; early Victorian science: science in culture.

Abstract

During the nineteen sixties a group of young historians of science undertook a fresh study of Victorian science. They immersed themselves in the primary sources the voluminous public and private records and in the economic, political, and social history of the period. The result was a lively, seminal, and important reassessment of Victorian science. Surely Cannon's articles on early Victorian science, those of Rudwick, Hooykaas, and Coleman on geology, and those of R. Young's on Darwinism I have secured a permanent place in the historical studies of that period. Cannon's essays on the Cambridge intellectual network, on Herschel, on the interpretation of miracles in the 1830s, on the uniformitarian -catrastophist debate, on Darwin, are among the most stimulating and insightful articles dealing with Victorian science that have been written during the past two decades.2 Cannon has amalgamated the content of these articles into a book,Science in Culture,3 which not only addresses the subjects previously dealt with, but contains much new material on the sociology of science the formation of the British Association