‘Hitherto want of accuracy and definiteness have often been brought as a charge against geology, and sometimes only with too much justice’, wrote Archibald Geikie in a review of Sir Roderick Murchison'sSiluria(1867). ‘We seem now to be entering, however, upon a new era, when there will be infused into geological methods and speculation, some of the precision of the exact sciences’. Geikie's judgement echoed an appeal made some thirty years earlier by William Hopkins (1793–1866) that the science of geology needed (...) to be ‘elevated’ from a level of ‘indeterminate generalities’ to a rank among the stricter physical sciences. This paper aims to analyse, in the context of broader trends favouring measurement and mathematics in British scientific practice, Hopkins' role in the promotion of dynamical geology as a major new complement to stratigraphical geology such that, for example, in the first edition of Geikie'sTextbook of Geology(1882) the dynamical and stratigraphical components each filled 376 pages. (shrink)

Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord , “Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century”, History of Science, xlviii . Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article.

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)