The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

by Richard Holmes

Then he realised that the Tahitians were surfing. No European had ever witnessed — or at least recorded — this strange, extreme and quintessentially South Seas sport before.

Michael Hoskin has suggested in his essay ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’ (1980) that most histories of science continue to be ‘uninterrupted chronicles’, which run along ‘handing out medals to those who “got it right”’. They ignore the history of error, so central to the scientific process, and fail to illuminate science as a ‘creative human activity