Chapter XXIII: Transformations of Victorian Science

The Prince Consort's influence in organizing pursuits and departments
of knowledge, a characteristic of the Victorian age. The Prince not
only the advocate of the 1851 Exhibition, but most active in the
movement that has given us South Kensington as an instrument in the
knowledge of art and science. The British Association foreshadowed by
a like organization in Germany which may have impressed the youthful
Prince Albert, but certainly set the example to the leaders of English
science. Like its German forerunners the British Association gradually
grew in popular favour. Its progress as shown by facts and figures.
Modern course of science summarized. The transforming influences of
science traced in all intellectual pursuits.

If in a few words the contrast between the England of the later and the earlier part of the Queen's reign were to be summed up, it might be expressed by the single word, organization. For that process, as for its most impressive results, Victorian England is indebted primarily to the husband of its Queen. To-day Englishmen are reminded locally and visibly of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by the elaborately picturesque memorial of the man who spared no pains to secure its success, situated, as that monument is, on the spot where the great glass house once stood.

That event was the earliest triumph of the new epoch of culture including science in its application to the conveniences or luxuries of daily life. From 1851 too, may be dated the organized encouragement of the inventor in all departments of scientific ingenuity.

Such a world's show might in due course have been devised by the wit of man, even if the Queen's husband had not recalled for reproduction in England the idea of the Frankfort fairs of the sixteenth century.[76] It is quite certain that without the Prince's personal enterprise and sustained supervision, and but for the invaluable co-operation of the late Sir Henry Cole, the movement which has transformed the Court suburb from laundry grounds, or riding schools, into a centre of artistic or scientific education for the whole country had it taken place at all, would not have occurred till many years later than it actually did. The contrast between the South Kensington of the Queen's accession year with its suburban desolations, and of the sixtieth anniversary year, with its palaces of art, its private mansions rivalling those of Park Lane, its Imperial Institute, its provision for educational classes by day, for musical fetes by lamplight, might have been indefinitely postponed.

The name of Her Majesty written in the clear bold hand of youth when she became Queen may be read to-day in the register of the Royal Society. That entry prefigured the close connection between science and the Court which, for the first time in the history of the monarchy, was to signalize her reign. The period preparatory to the enthronement of science and art beneath the glass roof of Paxton was of scarcely less educational value to the Kingdom than, to most appliances of daily life, the Exhibition itself was to prove. The instructive addresses delivered at this time by the Prince Consort, now to a gathering of artists and writers, now to more popular audiences at Birmingham or elsewhere, may seem to those who read them to-day familiar or even commonplace. They were then entire novelties, not only from their authorship, but from their subject.

In 1897 it appears the most natural and suitable thing in the world that a Royal Prince should vary the more strictly ceremonial functions of State by opening an art gallery in London, a science school in the provinces, an Imperial Institute, a Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington. Fifty years since such a part seemed of questionable wisdom to some, of dangerous precedent for the monarchy to others; at the best a foreign experiment which the Queen's husband would most wisely have left unmade. In the sixtieth year of the reign, there is no social gathering or private dwelling, there is scarcely a village inn, or country cottage, or a seaside lodging house, that by the paper on its walls, the designs of its furniture, the suspended pictures cut from illustrated prints, fails to remind one with eyes to see such things the extent to which ideas of art or ornament that began with the Prince and Sir Henry Cole have directly from South Kensington penetrated into every corner of the land, and made their humanizing influence felt beneath the roof of peasant as well as of peer.

Even in the thirtieth year of the reign, these forces had scarcely advanced beyond the embryonic stage. Had the Prince Consort himself claimed visibly to exercise the Royal prerogative, on which as a fact he never presumed, he could scarcely have given a greater shock to the prejudices of those high in social position and near the Court who inherited from Hanoverian times a contempt for all distinctions save those of birth and rank.

Up to the moment of his death the Queen's husband was endeavouring to make his wife's Court a centre not only of achievement in war, of statesmanship in peace, but of letters, art, science, and of the most famous among their contemporary ornaments. Death prevented the design from ever being carried out completely. The names of Alfred Tennyson and of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley are enough to remind one of the direction actually travelled by the Prince in producing some resemblance between the Windsor where a Victoria reigned, and the Weimar whose intellectual glories, a Goethe had typified. Here again the intellectual revolution which the Court began has been continued by those who represent the Crown to-day.

Such knowledge of physical science as the Prince Consort's son possesses was largely imparted to him by the teacher Faraday, who was his father's choice. Appropriately enough, therefore, in the winter of 1897 did the Prince of Wales assist in founding the Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Society. The progress now spoken of seems to be symbolized by the acceptance of the word 'science' as the nearly exclusive synonym for that physicism which is strictly only one of the divisions that generically it includes. From the check to the regular teaching of physical knowledge at the disorganization spread through the world by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and by the concentration of human thought upon politics and theology, instead of those subjects first expounded by Thales, after him by Archimedes, Aristotle, Ptolemy, till the day of the modern doctors had dawned, the conquests achieved by man over nature were inconsiderable. Francis Bacon's equalization of human _ingenia_, and his elaborately tabulated apparatus for studying phenomena, created an appetite for mastering the arcana of the visible universe, but did not satisfy it. As the Prince Consort clearly saw, Nature's secret had been yielded in the past, and would be surrendered in the future, not to founders of systems like a Verulam or a Descartes, but to actual discoverers who did not owe even their methods to the Schools.

Half a century after Bacon's labours, Newton, with no help from Baconian methods discovered the law of gravitation, and with it the unity of sequences which pervade material creation. The cause of the slight progress of physical science whether before or immediately after Bacon formulated his method may be partly explained by the want of the material appliances for physical investigation. These in anything like their mechanical perfection of to-day are not much older than our present era. The agencies of glass, of alcohol, of microscopes and of other such appliances were as unknown to the physicists of Alexandria, of Athens, or of the Middle Ages as the electric wire itself. Where the subject matter, the heavenly bodies, the structure of the human frame, could be studied without elaborate machinery, the contemporaries or successors of the Ionian physicists who searched for the origin of all things in some single element, air, fire or water, seem rudely to have anticipated later discoveries. The Aristotelian philosophy and the rudiments of practical medicine, preserved together by Averrhoes, Avicenna, and the whole school of the Arabian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, descended in each other's company to the Italian schoolmen, and were delivered by them to English students. Thus, on the eve of the present century, the indestructibility of matter, however Protean the forms of its manifestations, had been ascertained by European chemists. The year of the Queen's accession was also that of the publication of Whewell's _History of the Inductive Sciences_.

In this age, as in that of Bacon, great lawyers have taken a foremost place among enquirers into the nature of things. Lord Brougham did something to methodize, and more to popularize, the facts of science. A greater lawyer than Brougham, Sir William Grove, Justice of the Common Pleas first, Judge of the High Court of Justice afterwards, was also professor of experimental philosophy at the London Institution during the first decade of the reign. His discoveries with regard to the correlation of forces had not been entirely formulated when Dr Whewell's book appeared. Nor had Charles Darwin completed in his retirement at Down, in Kent, those researches which in 1859, gave the world _The Origin of Species_. This book, if the work of any single man ever did so, created an epoch, not in physical enquiry alone, but in every branch of human knowledge conducted on scientific principles.

The Victorian Court had begun to encourage science before Darwin's great book was published. In 1847 the Prince Consort became Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and in this capacity he was naturally brought into official and friendly relations with Dr Whewell, then Master of Trinity, as well as with other English leaders of scientific thought. The growing success of the British Association after its inaugural congress had been held, is not unjustly connected with the Prince's name. The idea of an annual parliament of learning was, like that of the Great Exhibition itself, not of English origin. Even in Germany, where the first trial of it had been made, prosperity had been gradual. At Halle, Frankfort, Dresden, and Munich, notwithstanding the personal distinction of its chief promoter Professor Oken, and its encouragement by many of the enlightened Kinglets who then divided the rule of the Fatherland, during the second decade of the century when the enterprise began, its most noticeable meeting does not seem to have numbered more than from 200 to 400. At Leipsic in 1822, the attendance was barely two score; six years later in Berlin, it amounted to 464. Before that assemblage probably had much impressed the young Prince Albert, it had stimulated the most distinguished representatives of scientific thought in England. Sir David Brewster, Sir John Herschel, Sir Humphry Davy based, upon the German example, an appeal to the English Government. The decline of arts and science in this country was attributed to their total neglect by the State, to the exclusion of men eminent in either of these departments from the titular decorations of the country, and to the heavy exactions from scientific inventors imposed by the fees payable under the patent law.

More than two or three decades of the Victorian age had passed before art, science, and letters began to receive the State recognition now firmly acknowledged as their due. Both Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay had served in Parliament or in office fifteen years before they were ennobled.[77] Tennyson was the first English poet raised to the peerage who knew no politics save those of patriotism; to the same epoch, too, belongs a like honour bestowed upon three men of science at successive intervals:--now a physician, Playfair, now the physicist, Lord Kelvin, and again the latest, and to not a few the most welcome and significant of all, the inventor of the antiseptic treatment which has saved so many lives and limbs, who will henceforth be known as Lord Lister.

It is suggestively prophetic of the new era which in the next reign was to open for letters, science and art in their relations to the English State, that while the country had been preparing for a revolution peaceful but complete in politics, there had assembled at York, September 29, 1831, a company which prognosticated the coming revolution throughout the whole region of popular thought and culture. The York meeting mustered less than 200. It was intended only to launch the programme of the society. 'To point out the lines of direction in which the researches of science should move, to state the problems to be solved, the data to be fixed, to assign to every class of mind a definite task, to amend the laws relating to patents, to agitate for a Government provision to encourage and reward scientific research;'--these are the objects which Mr Harcourt enumerated in the first official document of the body. As proof of the vitality of the revolution which that Yorkshire company, less than 200 strong, introduced, it is enough to mention Dr Rae's Arctic voyages of 1853-4, the Challenger expedition of 1872, and the last Oxford University Commission which at the instance of the first scientific Premier England has ever known, Lord Salisbury, endowed scientific research as one of the estates of the realm, and has done something more than relieve that seat of old learning from the reproach of discouraging the newest sciences. Little perhaps did the doctors of divinity, and classical professors, when, on June 18, 1832, they welcomed the second senate of savants to its session on the Isis, imagine themselves to be fostering a movement which would partially oust from its emoluments and honours in their own Schools the old learning, and give to the new not only professorships for its teachers, but scholarships for the reward of its learners. As against the York meeting in 1831 of not much more than 100, the Oxford meeting of the Reform Act year attracted 700. In another twelvemonth the Cambridge meeting of June 25, 1833, was attended by 900. The Edinburgh meeting of September 8, 1834, mustered 1,298.

Since then the most noticeable figures have been 1855--2,133, 1861--3,138; while 1887 crowns the list with 3,838. The figures necessarily are to some extent governed by the importance or attractiveness of the towns at which the meetings are held. The names on the books of the society are more than half a million. So progressive a thing is English science. The meeting itself is only a part of the work done. Throughout the year committees are investigating various branches of science prominent at the moment, and preparing their reports to be included in the Annual General Report, a document of over 1,000 pages. Social satire at first made merry over the learned ladies and gentlemen who combined mutual laudation of themselves with picnics, excursions and pleasure parties of all sorts in interesting neighbourhoods at the most agreeable season of the year. To-day no one denies the British Association the credit of having promoted the discovery of new facts in science, or at least having been the first agency to draw public attention to them. Within the last few years, it was at one of these Association meetings (Liverpool 1870) that Professor Huxley pronounced against the popular theory of spontaneous generation of the lower forms of life, thus placing on record his adherence to the theory of biogenesis as opposed to abiogenesis; life, in other words, could in every grade of creation only come from life, not from the corruption of death. Thus was a physical tradition that from the earliest times down to the seventeenth century had held its own, finally repudiated by the greatest authority of his day on all biological matters.

Even this pronouncement seems to have been anticipated. A physicist less famous than Huxley, Schwann, some half a century before Huxley's day, is said to have been the first to criticize the abiogenesis doctrine as supported by no sufficient evidence. The tendency towards unity in multiplicity declared by the old Greek thinkers to characterize all true science marked the doctrines of the correlation of force as well as of the conservation of energy, both of them connected with this age. It was also inherent in the theory of evolution as explained by Charles Darwin in 1859, 28 years, that is, after the British Association for the first time met. Even the great Kentish physicist of our day was not entirely the first in the field with the discovery that was to transform the whole region of thought. Early in the last century De Maillet had applied the principle of the survival of the fittest to the world of human life. On the eve of the present century Charles Darwin's ancestor, Erasmus, as well as German philosophers still more famous, elaborated with more ability and knowledge the same idea, which also underlay the discussions between the French Academicians, Cuvier and St Hilaire. However the ground may have been prepared for him, so far as any single man can be said to have discovered any great idea, Charles Darwin must be accounted the author of the theory of evolution as it is now understood.

Whewell's survey of the inductive sciences at the beginning of the reign dimly forecasts some discoveries which have since been verified. It contains no word prophetic of the doctrine by which, in the countless possibilities of its application, every branch of science in little more than a quarter of a century was potentially if not actually to be transformed. The eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession has witnessed the completion by Mr Herbert Spencer of the monumental treatise that applies the doctrines of Darwin to subjects that Darwin had not specially studied, perhaps with results which Darwin himself had not entirely foreseen. Whether a reaction against Darwinism has already, as some think, set in; how far, and with what consequences, that movement may go, are as yet only matters of speculation.

The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York.

The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British Association has so signally promoted. Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ was published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to explain the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times, electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light, as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong to the era that opened in 1837.

Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.

These achievements of a science which is generically new have not been accompanied with inactivity on the part of those sciences which, like astronomy, are probably in one shape or another nearly coeval with Creation itself. Long before the planet was actually discovered, the telescopes that swept the heavens had brought within their ken the spot at which in 1846 Neptune was proved to be. If the number of the heavenly bodies has not of late received many additions, new asteroids are constantly swimming into sight in the quarters where they had been suspected; comets, less looked for than these apparitions, are often announced to have flashed themselves upon the observer's sight.

The influence of scientific thought and conceptions upon the language of literature as well as of daily life, is only less remarkable than the material conquests of science themselves. The most instructive instance of this is afforded by the scholarly and illustrious woman of genius who will always be known to fame as George Eliot. The popular idea of Mr Herbert Spencer having influenced her studies and her phraseology is not quite true. Mr Spencer was her own, and her companion's, friend. Her diction in her later works was inspired by the intellectual forces of her day. Of the formative power of these she was probably herself unconscious. If Herbert Spencer had a place among them, he was at least only one of several. From George Eliot, in that phase of her genius now under consideration, there has sprung a school. However original the gift of writers like Mrs Humphry Ward, it seems unlikely that their talents would have taken the direction they have received and found their expression in the language they employ unless the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Middlemarch_ had first supplied a new want or created a fresh intellectual taste by a style that our forefathers might have admired, but might not always have been able to understand.

Of the many transformations wrought by Victorian science, not the least;--unscientific people might think it the greatest--is the assimilation of the idiom of fiction to that of the text books of the schools. The entire ethos of our oral diction not less than our literature has been revolutionized by science. When a parliamentary speaker illustrates his argument by a metaphor, it is not, as his forerunners once did, to the Latin and Greek classics, or even to literature at all, but to the laboratory, to the dissecting room, or to the crucible that he most frequently goes for his _trope_. The similes of the Attic masterpieces are taken habitually from those operations with which their naval empire familiarized the Athenian mind. Nor can these metaphors be understood without some remembrance of the processes which marine affairs involve. A similar acquaintance with the later operations of science is scarcely less useful for a proper appreciation of the most characteristic beauties of Victorian prose, by whatever master displayed. This dispossession of the literary by the scientific is universal. Following unconsciously perhaps the example of a great statesman, those who have in our day most widely differed from him on national affairs, a Randolph Churchill, or a Charles Stewart Parnell have reproduced the taste of a Salisbury in finding their recreations, not in the _belles lettres_ that were congenial to the day of a Pitt or a Canning, but in the researches that a Tyndall, a Huxley, a Thomson, have popularized.

Galileo's astronomical views found a useful ally by the incisive raillery of his literary style. The admirable prose of a Huxley and his fellow labourers has been no less effective for popularizing scientific studies with the public they have addressed. The social urbanity with which Nature and training have endowed Sir John Lubbock has prepossessed not a few on his own level in life in favour of those branches of physical enquiry that have enabled him to rehabilitate the moral character of the autumnal wasp.