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18 Natural Science
Get accessNoah Heringman is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Missouri. His most recent book is Deep Time: A Literary History (2023). Ongoing projects include a digital edition of the eighteenth-century print series Vetusta Monumenta (http://vetustamonumenta.org) and a translation of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s letters.
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Published:22 May 2024
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Abstract
This chapter shows how science writing originated as a part of scientific practice, pursued self-consciously by scientists in many disciplines as a way of integrating their new specializations into a long and distinguished history. The chapter argues that historical narrative, especially of the heroic kind, is crucial to science writing in the Romantic period because it legitimates the disciplinary changes occurring during the ‘second scientific revolution’, codified in the transformation of ‘naturalists’ and ‘philosophers’ into ‘scientists’ at the end of the period. Evidence is drawn from the experimental practice, historical and theoretical writing, reception, and institutional affiliations of Erasmus Darwin, Mary Somerville, Humphry Davy, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell, with historiographic considerations also based on the writings of Whewell as well as those of Thomas Carlyle.
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