Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, With Addresses and Other Pieces

by John Herschel, I. Bernard Cohen

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750 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2013

About the author

British astronomer Sir John Frederick William Herschel, son of William Herschel, brother of Caroline Herschel, cataloged nearly two thousand more deep-sky objects and conducted notable research on light, photography, and astrophysics.

This English mathematician, chemist, experimental photographer, and inventor in some years also worked valuably on botany. The son of Mary Baldwin Herschel, he fathered 12 children.

Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colorblindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_He...

Reviews

[Stephen Case · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historians of Victorian science often speak about a common intellectual context that fragmented in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The growth of scientific disciplines, the specialization of fields, and the proliferation of specialized journals made it difficult to stay abreast of all developments in science or maintain a synthetic view of the entire field. What's more, as science became professionalized, science writing moved to periodicals and publications written specifically for scientists. There arose a divide between science and popular writings or cultural criticism that largely remains to this day.

The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews represented what popular, high-brow literature looked like before these changes took place. In their glory days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Reviews were a place to discuss politics and culture-- including science. This collection of essays and poems by John Herschel illustrates the place that science held in popular culture. Though largely forgotten today, Herschel was arguably the leading popular figure in science in the generation before Einstein. In these essays he discusses everything from Laplace's celestial mechanics to Whewell's philosophy of science to Quetelet's statistics. What's fascinating is the detailed (though largely non-mathematical) treatment he goes into for a "popular" audience. These essays, important for historians of Victorian society in general and astronomy in particular, are also recommended reading (or, more likely, skimming) for anyone who is interested in the sort of treatment science was given in the Victorian period for the general, educated reader.