A count of articles by women listed in theCatalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800–1900, the nineteen-volume international index brought out by the Royal Society, produced a collection of almost 4000 titles of papers by about 1000 nineteenth-century women authors. Out of 181 geology papers in this collection, 118 (65 per cent) were by British women (see Table 1, columns 1 and 2). This finding is especially remarkable when considered against the more general background of nineteenth-century women's work in science (at least (...) as judged from women's contributions to the journal literature indexed by the Royal Society). In most fields American workers considerably outnumbered British and published many more papers. Geology, however, is an exception, with the British dominating the field by a wide margin. This essay discusses a number of the British women of the period who carried out work in geology, and offers some suggestions that go toward explaining their striking prominence among their contemporaries. (shrink)

Only weeks following Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne on 20 June 1837, a controversy brewed over the naming of the ‘vegetable wonder’ known today as Victoria amazonica . This gargantuan lily was encountered by the Royal Geographical Society's explorer Robert Schomburgk in British Guyana on New Year's Day, 1837. Following Schomburgk's wishes, metropolitan naturalists sought Victoria's pleasure in naming the flower after her, but the involvement of multiple agents and obfuscation of their actions resulted in two royal names for (...) the lily: Victoria regina and Victoria regia . To resolve the duplicity in names, the protagonists, John Edward Gray and John Lindley, made priority claims for their respective names, ultimately founding their authorities on conventions aligned with gentlemanly manners and deference to nobility. This article will analyse the controversy, hitherto unexamined by historians, and argue for its significance in repositioning Queen Victoria – and nobility generally – as central agents in the making of authority in early Victorian science. (shrink)

A summary of revisionist accounts of the contextual meaning of "professional" and "amateur," as applied to the mid-Victorian X Club, is followed by an analysis of the liberal goals and inner tensions of this coalition of gentlemen specialists and government teachers. The changing status of amateurs is appraised, as are the new sites for the emerging laboratory discipline of "biology." Various historiographical strategies for recovering the women's role are considered. The relationship of science journalism to professionalization, and the constructive engagement (...) of X Club publicists with their empowering audiences, are discussed. Finally, the article assesses how far the content and boundary closure of "biology," forged by Thomas Henry Huxley, were related to 'professional' and political goals. Pure biology's social and medical roots are examined, and the way inter-professional and wider Darwinian conflicts resulted in a new lexicon of words for the X Clubbers around 1870, including "evolution" and "agnosticism," as well as "biology." Biology's role in the forging of British national identity is discussed, as are its relationship to the social strategies of liberal, Dissenting, and industrial groups in the country, whose authority sustained the new laboratory rhetoric. (shrink)