Early Nineteenth-century Science Research Articles

Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë'sAgnes Grey

In Anne Brontë'sAgnes Grey(1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be “to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day.” Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the “humble glow-worm” who, without a “power of giving light” (i.e., beauty), “the roving fly might pass her . . . a thousand times, and never light beside her” (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever “dry, shriveled kernel” of narrative meaning might be found by “cracking the nut” (5). As character, the budding naturalist “botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges”; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism.

The Role of Patronage in early nineteenth-century science, as evidenced in letters from Humphry Davy to Joseph Banks

The recently published Collected edition of Davy's letters throws new light on the importance and modus operandi of Banksian patronage as a means of organizing and promoting science. It demonstrates how dependent on, and manipulative of, Banks's favour Davy's careerism was, despite his later fame as an original genius. Here, I select from the edition some examples that offer new perspectives on how the patronage relationship worked—how Davy fashioned himself to be patronized, as well as how Banks operated as patron. Discussing Davy's activities at the Royal Institution, at the Royal Society and for the Board of Agriculture, I show that his public success allowed him to shift the power balance in this relationship, so that he was able to call upon Banks's support over issues of his choice, and, during the safety lamp affair (1815–18), to cause Banks to take the rare step of entering a scientific controversy in the newspapers. This shift to a highly public medium heralded a significant change: in a new era of widespread industrialization, in which engineers operating outside scientific institutions had increasing scope to put their inventions into production, priority—and the general reputation of scientific knowledge—increasingly needed demonstration before a wider court of public opinion than hitherto. Davy pulled Banks into a new, exposed, position in an expanded and oppositional public sphere. After Banks died, and Davy was no longer a protégé of a powerful patron but was himself in a position to distribute patronage—Banks's successor as President of the Royal Society and Commissioner of the Board of Longitude—the letters reveal the strengths and limitations of Banksian governance in an era in which science was specializing and was increasingly discussed in the national press. Davy rejected some of his predecessor's policies but essentially retained Banks's method of directing science by privately exerting influence and controlling patronage. I suggest that this method was relatively successful at the Royal Society, where Davy managed (uneasily) to incorporate a generation of mathematical savants excluded by Banks; at the Board of Longitude it failed: Davy's efforts to emulate Banks as the promoter of exploration fell foul of institutional intransigence that he had neither power nor influence enough to shift.

Andersheit um 1800: Figuren—Theorien—Darstellungsformen eds. by Elisabeth Johanna Koehn, Daniela Schmidt, Johannes-Georg Schülein, Johannes Weiβ, and Paula Wojcik (review)

Elisabeth Johanna Koehn, Daniela Schmidt, Johannes-Georg Schulern, Johannes Weis, and Paula Wojcik, eds., Andersheit um 1800: Figuren-TheorienDarstellungsformen. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011.271 pp.This installment of the Schriftenreihe Laboratorium Aufklarung contains fifteen contributions from faculty and doctoral students and comprises the selected proceedings of a conference hosted by the Doktorandenschule Laboratorium Aufklarung (DSLA) at the Friedrich-Schuler-Universitat Jena in 2009- Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection brings into dialogue scholars and scholars-in-training from various fields of study, including Germanistik, philosophy, comparative literature, political science, and art history. The unifying theme binding these selections together is a reevaluation of commonly held assumptions, within and outside of academia, regarding the supposed dichotomy between literature and phuosophy in terms of their respective conceptualizations of Andersheit. The editors of this volume challenge the notion that, in the decades before and after phuosophy focused its attention almost entirely on dus Allgemeine (i.e., German Idealism), whereas the contemporaneous literary production concentrated its attention on das Besondere (i.e., FriihromantiU). The essays in this collection achieve their aim by successfully demonstrating that literature and phuosophy keine hermetischen gegeneinander abgeschotteten Spharen bilden (17), as well as that the interaction and interconnection between the two fields was highly creative and productive.After an introductory essay by the editors and initial remarks by Burkhard Iiebsch entitled Eine allzu vertraute Vergangenheit? Zur zwiespaltigen Aktualitat des literarisch-philosophischen Milieus um 1800, the treatment oi Andersheit is thematically divided into three categories: Figuren, Theorien, and Darstellungsformen. For the sake of brevity, only one contribution from each category will be discussed here.The first category, Figuren, interrogates specific representations oi Andersheit and their interactions with and effect upon concepts such as individuality, normality, and normativity in fictional and nonfictional texts. Here, Jan Niklas Howe (Folgerungen fur die Missgeburten: Monstrositaten bei Johann Friedrich Meckel und Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire) examines how the scientific terminology and methodology of newly established fields such as teratology affected the conceptualization of human anatomical alterity. Howe convincingly argues that, although these two renowned figures of early nineteenth-century science were deeply separated by perspective and scientific intent, Meckel's and St. Hilaire's writings were jointly successful in what Howe terms the Universalisierung des Monstrosen (93). Their work and theory thereby established a new vocabulary of deformity and abnormality, which was soon to be found in popular language and literature throughout the nineteenth century.The second category of essays in the collection, Theorien, concentrates on the construction of Andersheit in philosophical and aesthetic discourses around 1800. In her essay 'Alteritat' in Theorie und literarischer Gestaltung: Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Hoffmann, Barbel Frischmann demonstrates how an awareness of and appreciation for alterity constitutes an inextricable element within Fichte's and Hegel's formulations of individuality and self-awareness. …

Fossil ‘treasure trove’ found in British Geological Survey vaults

The British Geological Survey is home to more than three million fossils collected over two centuries and catalogued with enormous precision. However, as generations of curators have come and gone, a few collections have lain forgotten and their significance has gradually passed out of memory. Six months ago, I pulled opened some drawers marked ‘unregistered fossil plants’ in one of the Survey's windowless vaults in Keyworth, in central England. What I found inside made my jaw drop. Contained within were hundreds of beautiful thin sections of fossil wood dating from the early nineteenth century. The collection was assembled by botanist Joseph Hooker (Darwin's best friend) while he was briefly employed by the Survey in 1846. The material includes some of the first thin sections ever made by William Nicol, the pioneer of petrography, in the late 1820s, as well as specimens picked up by Darwin and Hooker on their round‐the‐world voyages in the 1830s and 1840s. The collection is particularly interesting in the way it sheds light on the vibrant and sometimes murky world of early nineteenth century science. This is the story of these fascinating fossils.

(William T. Stearn Prize 2009) “The mighty cassowary”: the discovery and demise of the King Island emu

Nicolas Baudin's 1800–1804 voyage was the only scientific expedition to collect specimens of the dwarf emu (Dromaius ater) endemic to King Island, Bass Strait, Australia. The expedition's naturalist, François Péron, documented the only detailed, contemporaneous description of the life history of the bird, and the artist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur made the only visual record of a living specimen. Hunted to extinction by 1805, the King Island emu remains relatively unfamiliar. It is ironic that a bird collected as part of one of the most ambitious ordering enterprises in early nineteenth-century science – a quest for intellectual empire – has been more or less forgotten. This paper discusses how human error, assumption, imagination and circumstance hampered recognition and understanding of the King Island emu. Poor record-keeping led to the confusion of this species with other taxa, including the Australian emu and a dwarf species restricted to Kangaroo Island, contributing to the epistemological loss of the species. The expedition's agenda was equally influential in the perception and documentation of the species, with consequences for its conservation in the wild. The paper also argues that as a symbolic rather than a scientific record, Lesueur's illustration fostered inaccuracies in later descriptions of the King Island emu, especially when the image was taken out of context, subjected to the vagaries of nineteenth-century printing techniques and reproduced in more recent ornithological literature. Rather than increasing knowledge about this species, the Baudin expedition and its literature contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the King Island emu's textual and literal extinction.

Much throwing about of brains

In one of his marvellous letters to his brother and sister-in-law, John Keats broke off his ruminations about poetry in order to observe the position of his own body: ‘The fire is at its last click - I am sitting here with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated upon the carpet’. Medically trained at Guy's, Keats was fascinated by physiology and, in particular, by the relationship between emotional and bodily states, as manifested in the phenomenon of the blush or the instinct that both poetry and suffering are felt ‘on our pulses’. A theory of what might be called ‘embodied creativity’ led Keats to continue his letter with the speculation that ‘it would be a great delight’ to have a record of the physical posture of the great men of the past at key moments in their creative lives, as, for example, ‘to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be” (though we cannot, by the way, rule out the possibility that Shakespeare was standing or conceivably lying when he began to compose Hamlet's great meditation on life and death). Keats and his circle were also interested in the novel early nineteenth century science of phrenology. ‘The head of Keats was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull, a singularity which he had in common with Lord Byron and Mr Shelley, none of whose hats I could get on’, observed his friend Leigh Hunt, who had a bigger head and a lesser talent. It was commonplace in the Romantic era to associate Shakespeare's mighty genius with the vast dome of his forehead as depicted in the famous engraving at the front of his First …

The public worth of Mary Somerville

This article assesses the reputation of Mary Somerville in the 1830s and suggests that critical confusion over her status in the changing world of early nineteenth-century science is not new. Drawing on Somerville’s own writings, contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews, political debates and unpublished manuscripts, Somerville's ‘uniqueness’ as a public figure is examined through the eyes of both the nascent scientific community of the time as well as the wider audience for her work. Somerville's status as a popularizer and an educator is more complicated than may have previously been assumed and can be both confirmed and undermined by an analysis of contemporary public opinion. Although her works were directed at the public who indirectly paid her pension for services to science, Somerville's private and published comments about and within her writings offer an alternative interpretation. Despite an apparent turn to more popular works in order to bolster her finances, Mary Somerville relished the specialist aspect of her writings and valued the difficulties which prevented the ordinary reader from obtaining ultimate insight into celestial mechanics.

Religion In Children's Literature: Introduction

Religion In Children's Literature:Introduction Frank P. Riga The claim that all important questions are religious questions seems, on the surface, exaggerated. Yet the Call for Papers on religion in children's literature has met with a considerable response, both in quantity and in variety of approach. Among the authors dealt with, moreover, even an occasional non-believer surfaced. Perhaps such a response should not be surprising given the general interest in religious questions manifest in American society. Much evidence implies, however, that Americans are materialistic and secular, and recent pop-psychologies argue for the primacy of the autonomous self. If there are answers to the questions that give life meaning, such psychologies say they are found within homocentric parameters. Despite this, and despite the rumored death of God, the interest in religion and, no doubt what is more important, the search for religious faith continue. And like all important societal concerns, these find their way into children's literature. As the following papers demonstrate, the subject of religion in children's books involves us, not only in specific questions and themes, but in the social and critical perspectives of which children's books are a part. The recent televangelist scandals provide an almost staged background for the first essay in the Special Section. In "The 'Born Again' Phenomenon in Children's Books," Karen I. Adams discusses the preoccupation with religious fundamentalism within the context of the "new realism" in young adult books. While the new realism of the 1970s and 80s has allowed for the presentation of such formerly taboo subjects as sex and drugs, it has likewise allowed for a more realistic portrayal of religious matters, including "failures, flaws, and hucksters." Books like M.E. Kerr's Little Little and Cynthia Rylant's A Fine White Dust reflect contemporary evangelism in which, among other things, religion has become "big business" garnering "big bucks." Despite this hoopla and hypocrisy, the resurgence of interest in religion touches on a recurring concern of young people, who try to come to terms with their religious impulses in a secular, sometimes anti-religious, environment. That Katherine Paterson was the daughter of missionaries and a former missionary herself, however, attests to the fact that young people's religious concerns can grow as naturally out of life as any other human need. Rylant, too, reassures us, I think, when she questions the God of terror and hell fire: "after all, would you want people loving you if the only reason they did so was because of fear?" That religious considerations in children's books are not simply a personal matter is disclosed in Joan DelFattore's concise review of the Mozert case in Tennessee. This paper demonstrates how religious concerns and children's literature come together, but the question is not how such preoccupations find their way into children's books, but rather, having found their way into the literature, how certain segments of society react to them. Here, under the stress of a First Amendment challenge, believers' rights come into conflict with public education. The pluralism involved indicates, of course, the lack of cultural unanimity that, on the one hand, leads to conflict and, on the other, seems necessary for the various forms of individual freedom so highly prized in our times. Specifically, DelFattore gives a lucid and comprehensive analysis of the issues involved, not only in this celebrated litigation, but in virtually all fundamentalist challenges to modern children's books. Regardless of how we react to those challenges—and the specter of censorship, by either religious or secular interests, seems always ready to materialize—they force us, by their insistent focus, to question how books influence readers. As the third essay in the Special Section reminds us, the religious implications of children's books have long been a serious social concern. Here, Alan Rauch studies the relationship of science and religion in early nineteenth-century science textbooks. As Rauch argues, an examination of these textbooks reveals a growing tension between science and religion that was neither apparent nor threatening. Since "science must explain the world through physical laws and religion by supernatural causes," the covert split between the two was latent in...

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Preface Introduction: nature and mind 1. Early years: from Hartley to Davy 2. Surgeons, chemists and animal chemists: Coleridge's productive middle years from the Biographia literaria to Aids to reflection 3. Two visions of the world: Coleridge, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of nature 4. Coleridge and metascience: approaches to nature and schemes of the sciences 5. The construction of the world: genesis, cosmology and general physics 6. Geology and chemistry: the inward powers of matter 7. Life: crown and culmination Notes Index.

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Poetry Realized in Nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, by Trevor H. Levere

<i>Poetry Realized in Nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science</i>, by Trevor H. Levere

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Poetry realized in Nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and early Nineteenth-Century Science. By T. H. LEVERE. Pp. xiv + 272. Cambridge: University Press, 1981. £22.50 net. IAN M. WYLIE IAN M. WYLIE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXV, Issue 139, August 1984, Pages 394–396, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXV.139.394 Published: 01 August 1984

Coleridge's Moral Copula

In 1840 J.S. Mill surveyed the intellectual landscape around him and reported that it was dominated by two great figures: Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' Between them, he said, they defined the terms of reflective thought, embodying the choices that had to be made and the dilemmas that had to be resolved. Cold calculation or warm sentiment? Individualism or community? Utilitarianism or Romanticism? If Mill was right then we should expect to find these two currents of thought flowing through all the cultural products of that time. This seems plausible if we are dealing with philosophy or economic theory or political rhetoric, but what about science? While there may seem to be a natural affinity between science and utilitarianism, the link with the romantic tradition is less easy to grasp. The temptation is to say that the idealist metaphysicians, and nature-philosophers who belonged to this tradition, were not contributing to science so much as perverting it. They might be using it, or extrapolating it, but they were not doing it. In short, we draw a line of demarcation between men like Coleridge and those like his friend Sir Humphry Davy who were, we are in no doubt, really scientists. Trevor Levere's fascinating book, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, is one of a number of recent works that are helping to challenge our

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Trevor H. Levere.

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Trevor H. Levere.

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Trevor H. Levere

<i>Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science</i>. Trevor H. Levere

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science

Geology in American education: 1825–1860

Research Article| August 01, 1977 Geology in American education: 1825–1860 MARKES E. JOHNSON MARKES E. JOHNSON 1Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 Search for other works by this author on: GSW Google Scholar Author and Article Information MARKES E. JOHNSON 1Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637 Publisher: Geological Society of America First Online: 01 Jun 2017 Online ISSN: 1943-2674 Print ISSN: 0016-7606 Geological Society of America GSA Bulletin (1977) 88 (8): 1192–1198. https://doi.org/10.1130/0016-7606(1977)88<1192:GIAE>2.0.CO;2 Article history First Online: 01 Jun 2017 Cite View This Citation Add to Citation Manager Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Search Site Citation MARKES E. JOHNSON; Geology in American education: 1825–1860. GSA Bulletin 1977;; 88 (8): 1192–1198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/0016-7606(1977)88<1192:GIAE>2.0.CO;2 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Refmanager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentBy SocietyGSA Bulletin Search Advanced Search Abstract The year 1825 is a landmark in the history of American geological education owing to innovations pioneered by William Maclure and Amos Eaton. School systems devised independently by them offered a wide background in early nineteenth century science, including for the first time practical experience in field geology. To learn by doing was the simple maxim employed in education. Eaton's Rensselaer School at Troy, New York, and Maclure's School of Industry at New Harmony, Indiana, soon developed into the most successful training centers for students of field geology in the United States. State and Federal involvement in the surveying of natural resources expanded toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1860, 56 geological surveys were conducted in 33 states or territories. The Troy and New Harmony schools provided leaders and participants for nearly half (48%) of these projects. The most prominent students were David Dale Owen, of New Harmony, and James Hall, of the Rensselaer School. This content is PDF only. Please click on the PDF icon to access. First Page Preview Close Modal You do not have access to this content, please speak to your institutional administrator if you feel you should have access.