Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Neve ◽  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Field Observation ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Regional Geology ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Rock Formations

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained.

Faith and Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Mathieson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Conservative Christianity ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
William Paley ◽  
Eternal Punishment ◽  
Evangelical Theology

This chapter examines Stokes as an outspoken scientist of faith. It uses Stokes to examine the intellectual threats to conservative Christianity in the second half of the nineteenth century, and highlights his leading role among Victorian Britain’s religious scientists, through bodies such as the Royal Society and the Victoria Institute. It also explains how Stokes’s upbringing and education formed the basis for his own evangelical theology, and highlights his two most significant contributions to that field. First, it explores Stokes’s opposition to the doctrine of eternal punishment, and his promotion of conditional immortality as an alternative. Second, it highlights how Stokes continued to advocate the natural theology and teleological argument of William Paley a century after they were first proposed, as a method of harmonizing faith and scientific practice.

IRELAND, COLONIAL SCIENCE, AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH RULE IN INDIA, c. 1820–1870

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY CROSBIE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Irish People ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Exchange ◽  
Geological Research ◽  
Colonial Science

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rothwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThroughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

Quasi-static electric and magnetic fields in vacuum

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Pierrus
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Field ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Magnetic Fields ◽  
Electric Field ◽  
Electromagnetic Induction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Time Dependent ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Electric And Magnetic Fields ◽  
Practical Standpoint

In this chapter, the transition from time-independent to time-dependent source densities and fields is made. It is here that Faraday’s famous nineteenth-century experiments on electromagnetic induction are first encountered. This important phenomenon—whereby a changing magnetic field produces an induced electric field (whose curl is now no longer zero)—forms the basis of most of the questions and solutions which follow. Some new and interesting examples—not usually found in other textbooks—are introduced. These are treated both from an analytical and numerical point of view. Also considered here is the standard yet important topic (at least from a practical standpoint) of mutual and self-inductance. Several questions deal with this concept.

Tennyson's Optics: The Eagle's Gaze

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-428
Author(s):  
Gerhard Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Material World ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The visual focus in Tennyson's poetry moves between particularized objects and hazy vistas. His particularist bent, arising in part from myopia, coincided with the bias of an age that both exalted the Symbol and revered empirical observation. But Tennyson's fears of psychic entrapment within the object and of nature's uncontrollable prolixity inclined him alternatively toward the receding “past” and the distanced “picture.” This tendency reinforces itself through the correlative temporal and spatial frames of his poetry: “modern frames” enclose his “pasts”; “casements” focus his “pictures.” Tennyson thus exemplifies the Victorian attempt to reconcile particulars and universals, and the “telescopic dualism” of nineteenth-century painting and poetry, wherein detailed foregrounds and indefinite, receding backgrounds are discrete. In Tennyson such a division distinguishes a material world precisely apprehensible through sight and a spiritual one that fades toward diaphaneity. The paradigm for Tennyson's unattainable goal of optical (and epistemological) inclusiveness is “The Eagle.”

OPAQUE AND TRANSLUCENT EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCE IN COLLABORATIVE SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE

Episteme ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Wagenknecht
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Field Observation ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Gray Zone ◽  
Epistemic Dependence ◽  
Dependence Relations ◽  
Scientific Labor

AbstractThis paper offers an analytic perspective on epistemic dependence that is grounded in theoretical discussion and field observation at the same time. When in the course of knowledge creation epistemic labor is divided, collaborating scientists come to depend upon one another epistemically. Since instances of epistemic dependence are multifarious in scientific practice, I propose to distinguish between two different forms of epistemic dependence, opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. A scientist is opaquely dependent upon a colleague if she does not possess the expertise necessary to independently carry out, and to profoundly assess, the piece of scientific labor which her colleague is contributing. If the scientist does possess the necessary expertise, I argue, her dependence is translucent. However, the distinction between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence does not exhaust dependence relations in scientific practice, because many dependence relations are neither entirely opaque nor translucent. I will discuss why this is the case, and show how we can make sense of the gray zone between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence.

Historicizing health and education

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Patrice Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Children ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Politics Of The Body ◽  
Scientific Ethos

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical roots of the modern relationship between health and education. The author draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem to make the case that the transformation of medical knowledge in the early nineteenth century created new ways knowing that was the foundation of a modern relationship between health and education. Design/methodology/approach Using the archives of ophthalmology, the author demonstrates how new medical knowledge and scientific methods were the basis of investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century. These investigations reflected the nineteenth century scientific ethos that placed a premium on techniques such as counting, measuring, statistical reasoning, and empirical observation to form the grounds of legitimacy of an autonomous “objective” knowledge. The modern relationship between health and education was an instance of a generalized medico-scientific interest in the health of populations that utilized the methods of empirical positivist science whose speculative interest was aimed at defining the normal. Findings Scientific investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century contributed to the formation of an anatomo-politics of the body and a biopolitics of population through a “medical mathematics” that defined a relation between eyesight, health and education. Originality/value This study illustrates how sources such as the archives of ophthalmology can broaden and deepen our understanding of the relation between health and education.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore

2015 ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Amy M. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Victorian Period

Victorian natural science is not something separate from culture and social life, but integral to Victorian literary culture broadly defined. This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the professionalization of science occurred; at the same time a vibrant popular science existed. Natural history is part of a broader landscape of scientific culture in the nineteenth century beyond the poles of the ‘scientific naturalists’ such as Charles Darwin and the Anglican ‘gentlemen of science’. A particular nineteenth-century version of natural theology persisted at least until mid-century and even as late as the 1870s, manifesting especially in popular natural histories. One specific genre was the seashore natural history, in which there is a blend of empirical observation and theology, especially in the work of Philip Henry Gosse.

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