The Age of Wonder Read Free Page A

at the celebrated Hôtel Dieu hospital in Paris, and led a brief life of great intensity and self-sacrifice, inspired by French Revolutionary ideology. Developed analysis of human tissue types, histology, and materialist theory of life. His influential textbook On Life and Death was posthumously translated into English in 1816, and fed the Vitalism controversy in Britain.
    CHARLES BLAGDEN, 1748-1820. FRS 1772. Physician, bureaucrat, francophile and outstanding scientific gossip. He trained as a naval surgeon, and for some years worked as scientific assistant to Henry Cavendish. Under Banks he became the influential Secretary to the Royal Society from 1784 to 1797. Despite occasional rows, he remained the great supporter and personal confidant of Banks until his death in Paris, a few weeks before Banks’s own. To some degree his friendship replaced Solander’s for Banks.
    JEAN-PIERRE BLANCHARD, 1753-1809. French inventor and aeronaut who first crossed the Channel in a balloon, and founded a ballooning school in Vauxhall, London. (See Chapter 3)
    JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH, 1752-1840. FRS 1793. Influential German anatomist based at the University of Göttingen, who founded the science of anthropology and the pseudo-science of craniology, and developed an early classification of racial types. His famous collection of skulls was known as ‘Dr B’s Golgotha’. Friend of Banks, and famous lecturer at Göttingen heard by students from all over Europe, including Coleridge, William Lawrence and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.
    JOHANN ELERT BODE, 1747-1826. German astronomer and Director of the Berlin Observatory. Designed the most authoritative Celestial Atlas (1804), which finally superseded John Flamsteed’s of 1729. (See Chapter 2)
    LOUIS-ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE, 1729-1811. French naval commander and explorer, circumnavigated the globe and landed on Tahiti a year before James Cook. (See Chapter 1)
    DAVID BREWSTER, 1781-1868. Scottish physicist and campaigning science journalist. An early promoter of the BAAS with John Herschel. His researches included work on polarised light and lighthouse lenses, and he invented the kaleidoscope. He wrote an influential first biography of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), eventually expanded through several editions (1860). (See Chapter 10)
    COMTE DE BUFFON (GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC), 1707-88. French geologist and naturalist who developed early theories of the earth’s rapid, catastrophic changes through flood (supported by Neptunists) and volcanic action (Plutonists). He was director of the Jardin du Roi, the modern Jardin des Plantes, Paris, and wrote a forty-four-volume Natural History (1804). His studies of mountains and glaciers were referred to by Shelley in his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ (1816).
    FANNY BURNEY, MADAME D’ARBLAY, 1752-1840. Novelist, journal writer, friend of the Herschels through her father Charles Burney (FRS 1802), the musicologist. Fascinated but sceptical about scientific advances, she praised Caroline Herschel’s comet-finding work, and wrote to Banks wondering why women could not be Fellows of the Royal Society. Survived radical breast surgery without anaesthetic (Paris, September 1811), and wrote a long, courageous account of the experience. (See Chapter 7)
    GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1788-1824. Poet with a lively but sceptical interest in science and voyages. Looked through Herschel’s telescope, and met Davy both in London and in Italy. His poem ‘Darkness’ (1816) reflects current cosmological speculation, and several passages of Don Juan (1818-21) comment on scientific research and the vanity of ‘progress’. (See Chapter 9)
    SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834. Poet, critic, essayist and philosopher. Closely involved with Davy’s early scientific work in Bristol and London, 1799-1804. Later wrote about the history and philosophy of Romantic science in his newspaper The Friend (1809-19) and his Philosophic Lectures (1819), and became involved in the Vitalism debate, writing