358 Lightman
in droves, even though Huxley was busily excluding them from profes-
sional scientifi c societies. In his bid to upgrade the professional status of
the Ethnological Society in 1868, Huxley, the newly elected president,
moved to have women excluded from the “Ordinary Meetings,” where
the serious scientifi c discussions took place. Despite the objections of Eliza
Lynn Linton, a convert to Darwinism who became famous for her satirical
attacks on nineteenth- century feminism, Huxley relegated her and the
other women who regularly attended to the larger and popular “Special
Meetings.”^60 But women could draw on a previously existing tradition of
female popularization of science that sanctioned their involvement in
science writing. Like their predecessors in this tradition, they took on the
role of moral and religious guides and the majority of them claimed, in
opposition to Huxley and his allies, that recent scientifi c developments
revealed the workings of a divine creator. They contested the attempt
of scientifi c naturalists to secularize nature. Women wrote about almost
every area of scientifi c knowledge. Rosina Zornlin (1795–1859) produced
a series of books on physical geography and geology. Jane Loudon (1807–
1858), Anne Pratt (1806–1893), and Elizabeth Twining (1805–1889), as
well as Lydia Becker (1827–1890), prior to her involvement with the wom-
en’s suffrage movement, composed popular works on botany. Arabella
Buckley (1840–1929), who had been Charles Lyell’s secretary before turn-
ing to popular science writing, produced a series of works on evolutionary
theory. Sarah Wallis (later Bowdich and then Lee; 1791–1856) and Mary
Kirby (1817–1893) published widely in the area of natural history. In ad-
dition to her work British Seaweeds (1863), Margaret Gatty (1809–1873)
published the bestseller Parables of Nature (1855), a book of short stories
designed to teach children scientifi c, as well as moral, lessons. Mary Ward
(1827–1869) focused in her works on scientifi c instruments such as the
microscope and the telescope. At the end of the century, women’s involve-
ment in popular science writing was still going strong. In over a dozen
books published from the eighties up until the third decade of the twen-
tieth century, Agnes Giberne (1845–1939) explored both the heavens and
the oceans, while Agnes Clerke (1842–1907), tackled a wide range of astro-
nomical topics, ranging from the history of astronomy and biographical
studies of famous astronomers to current developments in astrophysics
and stellar astronomy. Eliza Brightwen (1830–1906) published a series of
works on natural history in the last decade of the century, including her
popular Wild Nature Won by Kindness (1890).
The career of Richard Proctor (1837–1888) vividly illustrates how
many popularizers resisted the ideals of scientifi c naturalists. Proctor, the
prolifi c popularizer of astronomy who fascinated the Victorian reading