Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), comparative anatomist, colleague and later antagonist of Darwin, and head of the British Museum of Natural History, was a major figure in Victorian science. Yet historians of science have found Owen a difficult subject, in part because he chose not to expound his views in a major theoretical work but rather presented them through annual lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons from 1837 to 1856. Nevertheless, Owen's views on the nature of life, the relations of form and function, the meaning of fossils, and the development of species gave his contemporaries such as Lyell, Grant, Huxley, Whewell, and Darwin a set of positions with which they could agree or disagree while developing their own views. Now, for the first time, modern readers how access to the opening series of Owen's Hunterian Lectures, in which he set out the larger framework of the theoretical reflections that occupied him during the next nineteen years. Presented to the public in the two months before Darwin began his first notebook on the species question, these lectures reveal the nature of the synthesis of French, German, and British biology taking place in metropolitan London in this crucial period in nineteenth-century life science. Phillip Reid Sloan has transcribed and edited the seven surviving lectures and has written an introduction and commentary situating the work in the context of Owen's life and the scientific and intellectual life of the time. Sloan pays particular attention to Owen's early relations to the German scientific and philosophical tradition, and in this respect contributes to an understanding of the relations between science and British Romanticism. In the lectures, Owen surveys the history of comparative anatomy up to his time and develops his views on the nature of life, species duration, physiological function, and the relation between embryology and classification. One can see the degree to which transcendental anatomy and the views of Von Baer, Johannes Müller, E. G. St.-Hilaire, and Cuvier were current in London in the late 1830s. -- from back cover.

Owen was the founder of the Natural History Museum, bringing the collections over from the British Museum. Although he was a supporter of evolutionary theory, he was reluctant to accept Darwin's version of evolution. This volume examines fossil evidence for change in species over time.

Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word 'scientist' was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. Bringing together the people, events, and discoveries of this exciting period into a lively narrative, this book will be essential reading both for students of the history of science and for anyone interested in the foundations of the world as we know it today.

Prior to the First World War, more people learned of evolutionary theory from the voluminous writings of Charles Darwin’s foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), than from any other source, including the writings of Darwin himself. But, with detractors ranging from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould to modern-day creationists and advocates of intelligent design, Haeckel is better known as a divisive figure than as a pioneering biologist. Robert J. Richards’s intellectual biography rehabilitates Haeckel, providing the most accurate measure of his science and art yet written, as well as a moving account of Haeckel’s eventful life.

Covering more than 50 central terms and concepts in entries written by leading experts, this book offers an overview of this new subdiscipline of biology, providing the core insights and ideas that show how embryonic development relates to life-history evolution, adaptation, and responses to and integration with environmental factors.

Contents: Sting Journalism: Introduction, Forms and Features, Sting Journalism: Ethics, Methods and Hidden Cameras, Sting Operations: Current Perspective, Famous Investigative Journalists and Scandals, Sting Operations in Indian Perspectives.

First published in 1951, Genesis and Geology describes the background of social and theological ideas and the progress of scientific researches that, between them, produced the religious difficulties that afflicted the development of science in early industrial England. The book makes clear that the furor over On the Origin of Species was nothing new: earlier discoveries in science, particularly geology, had presented major challenges, not only to the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, but even more seriously to the traditional idea that Providence controls the order of nature with an eye to fulfilling divine purpose. A new Foreword by Nicolaas Rupke places this book in the context of the last forty-five years of scholarship in the social history of evolutionary thought. Everyone interested in the history of modern science, in ideas, and in nineteenth-century England will want to read this book.

In this highly acclaimed book, Ospovat shows that Darwin's views changed radically from his first formulation of evolution to the publication of the full theory in 1859.

Written over several decades and collected together for the first time, these richly detailed contextual studies by a leading historian of science examine the diverse ways in which cultural values and political and professional considerations impinged upon the construction, acceptance and applications of nineteenth century evolutionary theory. They include a number of interrelated analyses of the highly politicised roles of embryos and monsters in pre- and post- Darwinian evolutionary theorizing, including Darwin’s; several studies of the intersection of Darwinian science and its practitioners with issues of gender, race and sexuality, featuring a pioneering contextual analysis of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection; and explorations of responses to Darwinian science by notable Victorian women intellectuals, including the crusading anti-feminist and ardent Darwinian, Eliza Lynn Linton, the feminist and leading anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe, and Annie Besant, the bible-bashing, birth-control advocate who confronted Darwin’s opposition to contraception at the notorious Knowlton Trial.