288 Thurs and Numbers
surge in the 1870s. Still, in the culture as a whole, phrenology had lost a
certain claim to respectability and plausibility. One author in 1887 caught
the mood of phrenology’s fall from grace in the attempt to salvage the
fi eld under the banner of a “new phrenology,” while casting aspersions
on the “old phrenology,” the latter leading to the former just like astrol-
ogy and alchemy lead to astronomy and chemistry. They were ultimately
distinguished not by the elimination of supernatural or superstitious but
by the fact that the new phrenology brought together the study of the
brain with “mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other sciences where
the old phrenology was isolated in this respect.”^25 Implicit in this move,
as well as the increasingly prominent “outsider” status of phrenology, was
a much stronger sense of orthodoxy than prevailed earlier in the century,
not simply in a patchwork fashion but one that extended and bound to-
gether the whole range of science into one whole.
Indeed, orthodoxy had made substantial gains over the 1800s, thanks
in no small measure to the champions of what came to be known as
professionalized scientifi c practice. Particularly in Britain, a core group
of young men of science had begun actively to campaign for a more re-
stricted and tightly controlled scientifi c community, often through the
capture of key institutions, such as the British Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science. The American inheritors of Bache and Henry scored
successes as well, though American scientifi c institutions tended to be
weaker than British ones. The work of aspiring professionals also had an
intellectual edge. Two of the most notable British professionalizers of the
period, John Tyndall and Thomas Henry Huxley, combined institutional
activity with a vocal defense of naturalism in science, including support
for Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution. Darwinian evolution proved a
valuable tool in the hands of such aspiring professionals and other people
sympathetic to the idea of a science surrounded by strict boundaries be-
cause it provided a potent symbol of the natural distinguished from the
supernatural. When belief in an evolutionary account of life was used as a
litmus test for separating scientifi c insiders from outsides, it also became
a means of freeing science from what some maintained was unacceptable
theological interference.^26
Emerging distinctions between science and religion became one of the
primary fault lines in the growing gap between science and not- science.
But it was not the only one. Other potent divisions in American public
culture included those between pure and applied science and between
the generation of scientifi c knowledge and its popularization. All these
new rhetorical habits enhanced the value of ejecting ideas and people
from the scientifi c fold, and therefore the invocation of pseudoscience.