Science and the Public 357developments.^57 Although most popularizers did not openly question the
authority of scientists as had Chambers, they insisted that the discovery
of new knowledge was not limited to expert professionals. Moreover they
conceived of themselves as natural historians, taking on the traditional
role of naming, describing, classifying, and uncovering the order of natu-
ral objects, while adopting a narrative that retained the explicit use of
storytelling as a technique to draw the reader into an appreciation of
the wonder of nature.^58 It is no coincidence that many of the Victorians
attracted to a career in popularizing science in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century belonged to those groups that Huxley and his colleagues
were trying to edge out of science. Women and the Anglican clergy were
particularly well represented among them, even though professional sci-
entists like Huxley did not believe that they had any authority to speak
about scientifi c subjects. If large book sales are any indication, the popu-
larizers were infl uential in determining the meaning of science in the
minds of the reading public.
An Oxford MA and ordained Anglican minister, the Reverend John
George Wood (1827–1889) retired from regular clerical work to pursue a
writing career as a popularizer of natural history. His most popular con-
tribution, Common Objects of the Country (1858), is said to have sold a
staggering hundred thousand copies in the very fi rst week, though this is
likely an exaggeration. Wood was not the only Christian minister who be-
came involved in popularizing science. He was joined by Ebenezer Brewer
(1810–1897), one of Jarrold and Sons’ most successful authors, whose A
Guide to the Scientifi c Knowledge of Things Familiar (1847) was in its fi fth
edition by 1850, with 113,000 copies printed by 1874.^59 Charles Alexander
Johns (1811–1874), whose Flowers of the Field (1853) reached its thirty-
fi fth edition in 1949, published widely on birds and botany. It was Johns
who had encouraged a passion for botany in the infl uential Broad Church-
man Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), his former student at Helston gram-
mar school. Kingsley, of course, went on to publish popular science works
of his own, including the charming Water Babies (1863). Another popular-
izer of botany, the Reverend George Henslow (1835–1925), published a se-
ries of popular works on fl owers in the last three decades of the nineteenth
century. The Reverend Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856–1927) capitalized
on the interest in dinosaurs and other extinct monsters in his books on
popular geology during the 1890s.
If Christian ministers were well represented among the ranks of the
popularizers of science, so were women. Mary Somerville (1780–1872) is
well known for her popularizations of the physical sciences, but many
of her sisters in science are not. Women were turning to popular science