This volume, edited by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, assembles essays from twelve authorities in Victorian science and culture. The essays are quite diverse in scope, ranging in topic from the lofty to the menial, from the paradox as the trope of the scientific naturalists (George Levine) to the naturalists' effect on science education as examiners in the University of London (James Elwick). All essays are thought provoking and have a bearing on the present. From the viewpoint of the timespan covered, Theodore Porter's “The Fate of Scientific Naturalism” brings the topic, through twists and turns, from the 1850s to the 1990s. The historical characters involved come across as gritty, true to life, complex, and even self-contradictory.

The book succeeds wonderfully in fleshing out the idea of scientific naturalism, a sociocultural movement, or ideology, begun in the nineteenth century, proposed by T. H. Huxley in 1892, capitalizing on previous usage of the term earlier in the century. Simply put, scientific naturalism considered the universe as a closed system. In practice, it meant to replace churchmen, many of whom were amateur naturalists with their natural theology view of the world, by professional men of science with a naturalistic worldview. The Victorian concept of scientific naturalism was recaptured by historians writing in the 1970s, particularly Frank Miller Turner, who features prominently in several of the essays and to whom the work is dedicated. The notes he used initially to characterize naturalistic scientists, namely professionalization, naturalism, and secularism, as opposed to the amateurism and religious conservatism of many earlier men of science, were in need of some revision to embrace the wide range of people and activities encompassed by the movement.

As a movement, scientific naturalism was loosely structured. There was no central office but the dinner tables of restaurants and private homes of young post–Origin of Species naturalists. They owned no (successful) newspaper to publicize their success, but they made their own the successes of science everywhere. There were no membership lists, but there were avowed friends and opponents. There were no written constitutions or corporate goals other than those imposed in public pronouncements by the movement's most articulate and ambitious champions, who had an insatiable appetite for influence over the means to spread their doctrine and which, in Huxley, included a case of “episcopophagy.”

The book stands well as whole, as the essays focus on how the initial core of Victorian scientific naturalists exploited every opportunity to announce their message to different sectors of society reaching ever wider audiences: parliamentarians, high-society ladies, working-class men, schoolchildren of all classes and their teachers, artists and craftsmen, academics from many disciplines all constituted publics worth addressing and were dazzled at times by their expertise. Conspiracy theorists would be disappointed to learn that there was no secret society involved and that business was conducted relatively in the open and in the midst of considerable opposition, which, however well established, could not match the scientific naturalists in vigor, cunning, and communication skills.

Six of the twelve chapters refer directly to the principles and practices that characterized the activity of Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall in the territory between their family lives and their workbenches. Their stance towards institutional religion, which was so powerful in the first half of the century, marked their activity with a certain dramatic quality that gave them—if it is not too much of a contradiction—an apostolic glow. Two other chapters refer to their intellectual executors, who carried insofar as they could, a less glorious battle against a less powerful and more liberal religion. Jim Endersby contrasts Joseph Hooker, of Kew Gardens fame, to Huxley and Tyndall as someone who was by birth and education the gentleman that Huxley and Tyndall for most of their lives struggled to be, and who, nonetheless, was committed to the cause of scientific naturalism.

Several questions emerge from the book for further study, such as the influence of German philosophy of nature (which was directly accessible to both Huxley and Tyndall, as both read and spoke German) on the theory of scientific naturalism, or how the laboratory came to be a teaching space and how it works even today as a tool in standard undergraduate learning, and whether its value in teaching has ever been validated or if it is just an urban myth. Yet another question is how evolution would have fared, not without Darwin—as Peter Bowler has recently speculated—but without Huxley.

Two essays stand out for their depth and beauty. In “Paradox: The Art of Scientific Naturalism,” George Levine lifts the reader to the emotions and aesthetic intuitions Tyndall felt in the mountains, the contemplation of which led him to a wisdom that had a halo of truth about it. As Ruth Barton demonstrated in the 1970s, Tyndall refuses to be pigeonholed as a mere materialist. Theodore Porter's “The Fate of Scientific Naturalism” is an insightful and wide-ranging reflection on the meaning and effects of the professionalization that scientific naturalism sought for science. Porter looks into the validity of this defining note, concluding that it never applied very strictly, in the 1860s or in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, and that—another paradox—insofar as it was achieved it might have had detrimental effects on scientific naturalism itself by separating science from the public, who, Porter hypothesizes, turned out to be less pliable to being educated on such science, and because science had to clip its wings to take a less ambitious, more specialized, technical role in society. He shows how the gradual ascent of technology led to the profound change, if not the death, of scientific naturalism.

Taken together, this volume's essays provide a valuable overview of scientific naturalism and, even more so, a winning introduction to the movement's charismatic personalities and their relationships with one another. The book will prove profitable reading for historians of science and for students of Victorian culture.