The shift in recent decades from depicting the history of science in nineteenth-century Britain as a cavalcade of pivotal books and papers, by the likes of Humphrey Davy, Charles Lyell, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and William Thomson, to examining the cultures that propagated such achievements has brought to the fore the role of periodicals, which became established early in the century as the most various and responsive medium for the public disclosure and discussion of ideas. The SciPer (Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical) project is grounded upon this recognition, an approach that is richly vindicated by the essays in Science Serialized, one of three volumes produced by the project to appear in 2004. By giving eminent writers in the field license to use periodicals as the focus, rather than simply as an adjunct source, for their respective studies, the editors of this volume have facilitated a series of compelling reevaluations of important topics in the history of nineteenth-century science. So, for example, by carefully examining the critical responses of contemporary religious magazines to the Bridgewater Treatises, Jonathan R. Topham's contribution efficiently corrects the rather patronizing and persistent idea that the Treatises evidence a widespread credulity among the early Victorians in the Argument from Design. Ann B. Shteir offers a similarly careful and fascinating explication of the ways in which various magazines early in the century addressed the presumed interest of their female readers in flowers, from equipping them with Linnaean taxonomy and sending them out to the fields to conduct primary research in the relatively accessible science of botany, to encouraging more domestic interests that prepared the way for later generations of Victorian women to content themselves with fluency in the symbolic “language of flowers.”

This collection of essays displays the nineteenth-century periodical press as a vigorous wholesale marketplace of ideas, guided and manipulated by diverse partisan interests and keenly responsive to its particular constituencies of readers. The medium is seen to document some intricate and subtle public negotiations of ideas and observations that are often retailed more discretely and definitively in books. Indeed several of the most impressive and exciting contributions to the volume demonstrate the ways in which the vigor of nineteenth-century periodicals, the promiscuous interminglings and odd juxtapositions they make between ostensibly disparate fields, facilitated the syncretic formation of new disciplines and licensed hybrid speculations. Roger Smith demonstrates the radical importance of periodicals in the development of the scientific discipline of psychology, as he scrutinizes journals from the decades 1855–75 to reveal a wide range of philosophical and physicalist ideas and sources, including experiences drawn from their readers, that are seen to shape this modern discourse in the years before the appearance of Wilhelm Wundt's Outlines of Physiological Psychology (1873) and Alexander Bain's journal Mind (1876). Similarly, Graeme Gooday's fine contribution traces the origins of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait's anonymously published antimaterialist defense of the energy principle The Unseen Universe (1875) through a series of journal articles from the preceding decade that Stewart and Norman Lockyer wrote on sunspots, which were, like the later book, supported by the publisher Alexander MacMillan. Gillian Beer's essay focuses upon the Academy to sketch the vast intellectual terrain in which the sciences grew, cross-pollinated, and distinguished themselves from one another. Charles Edward Appleton's Academy showcases the great nineteenth-century European Union of research fields, each granted respect and a place in the journal on the basis of their intellectual integrity and pitch of seriousness, their “importance,” from out of which certain constellations of concerns emerge as new sciences, the main examples here of linguistics and comparative mythology serving to highlight the suppleness of the disciplinary categories that were in process at this time. The magnificent but brief history of Appleton's ambitious journal suggests that late Victorian Britain was not after all in Europe but only near to it, its decline in the face of vociferous market forces registered satirically in a passage from H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay (1909), with which this elegant essay closes.

The consequences of an increasingly confident and professional rationalist science, which in the second half of the century subjected ever broader fields of inquiry and belief to its principles, are, as several essays here demonstrate, documented most urgently and dramatically in the periodical press. It is good to see attention given to Grant Allen, with a very interesting essay by Jonathan Smith on Allen's Darwinian account of the aesthetic sense. Two essays are devoted to W. K. Clifford. That by Helen Small focuses upon his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” incidentally developing some interesting and unexpected connections with William Whewell's thought, while Gowan Dawson's essay traces the efforts made by Clifford's widow Lucy to both sustain and modify conservatively the public memory of her late husband's work and character. James G. Paradis also explicates a rather poignant battle over reputations in his account of the Butler-Darwin controversy over Erasmus Darwin's biography. Complementing these essays, and also Gooday's essay on the “North British” physicists and Frank A. J. L. James's useful essay “Reporting Royal Institutions Lectures, 1826–1867,” Bernard Lightman documents the reactionary temper of much of the periodical press by tracing the sustained campaign that many popular journals made against John Tyndall after his 1874 Belfast Address, as they worked to transform his public image from the gentlemanly popular lecturer to the dangerous working-class atheist and materialist. Harriet Ritvo's essay offers an interesting study of a similar case of such conservatism in which the imperative to entertain and indulge the public compromised the scientific exposition of James Ewart's work on hybrids and his evidence against telegony. In their excellent essay on Henry Adams's editorship of the North American Review, Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson document most closely the willful use of scientific theory as a sort of cosmological pathetic fallacy, as the political mood of Adams and his journal shift from an optimistic progressivism, which is given its objective correlative and ground in uniformitarian geology and evolutionary biology, to a pessimism naturalized by catastrophist geology and the second law of thermodynamics. The exemplary specialist essays in this volume cohere in fascinating and suggestive ways to bring forward the uses that science was put to by the formidably powerful periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain.