362 Lightman
Huxley and his allies would have taken a dim view of Proctor’s combina-
tion of evolutionary theory, pluralism, and natural theology, especially
since it captured the imagination of the Victorian reading public for all
the wrong reasons.VICTORIAN READERS OF SCIENCE
If many professional science journalists involved in popularization activi-
ties resisted the scientifi c naturalists’ conception of science, what of their
readers? As we have seen, already in the early nineteenth century scientists
like Davy tried to establish a relationship with their audience that rendered
them passive. The emergence of disciplined, trained cadres of research sci-
entists, such as Huxley’s students in his laboratory at South Kensington,
widened the gap between the scientist and the wider public. The notion
of disciplined expertise was intended to restrict the community active in
creating and validating scientifi c knowledge, and to produce a passive
public. Closely connected with these changes in the relationship between
the scientist and the public was the creation by professional scientists of
the diffusionist notion of “popularization,” in which the communication
of scientifi c ideas took place in a linear process from the expert to the pub-
lic, who passively consumed them. It is no coincidence that the top- down
sense of the verb “to popularize” was developed in English at the same time
that the word “scientist” came to designate the new experts who sought
to position readers as invisible members of a mass audience. This notion
of popularization was an important element in the self- fashioning of the
professional scientist.^78 Many professional scientists, like Huxley, Tyndall,
and Spencer, all tried their hand at writing popular works. They recog-
nized that public support for science was essential to establish the cultural
authority of the scientifi c elite and to free up funding for scientifi c insti-
tutions. Perhaps the most famous attempt at codifying and popularizing
scientifi c knowledge in a systematic fashion to a wide- reading audience,
the International Scientifi c Series appeared in the United States and fi ve
European countries in over 120 titles between 1871 and 1910. It was writ-
ten for the most part by professional scientists and directed in its early
years in England by an advisory committee composed of Huxley, Tyndall,
and Spencer. Like Nature, the series stands as a monument to the efforts
of professionals to control the public’s understanding of modern science.
Though each contributing author was free to present their own defi nition
of science while focusing on their area of specialty, the initial aim was