368 Lightman
professional scientists, the North British Physicists, the resistance to sci-
entifi c naturalism within the scientifi c elite became apparent. Then, by
moving on to groups normally seen as outside professional science, the
science journalists who popularized science, and the reading public who
consumed science, it becomes clear that there was strong resistance to the
agenda of scientifi c naturalism from those who were supposed to be pas-
sive mediators or consumers of science. The entire analogy of center and
periphery becomes questionable as an adequate model for understanding
Victorian science. Of course the picture could have been complicated even
more had we included provincial science and even science in the colonies.
But the story is complicated enough to remind us of the importance of
studying the local settings of science that, as Jim Secord argues, “has made
it possible to escape the old image of science as dominated by a handful
of great theorists and simultaneously to understand theory making as a
form of practice.”^91 Looking back at the nineteenth century from the van-
tage point of the twenty- fi rst, we may be tempted to conclude that the
scientifi c naturalists won the contest to determine the meaning of science,
since our contemporary conceptions seem to share much in common with
Huxley’s vision of a secular and professional science. But victory was never
assured during Huxley’s lifetime, and we must be careful not to treat the
professionalization of science as if it were an inevitable process—akin to a
law of nature—just because we think we know the end of the story.
Coming to any overarching conclusions about similar contests during
the nineteenth century over the meaning of science in other national con-
texts, involving professional scientists, science journalists, and the public,
will have to await further research by historians of science.^92 Though a
process of professionalization played a signifi cant role at some point in
the nineteenth- century in Europe and the United States, the intricate in-
terplay between the social and cultural context and the development of
scientifi c institutions and ideas varied from country to country. In the
case of nineteenth- century German popular science, for example, where
Andreas Daum has done some work, there are fascinating parallels with
Britain. As in Britain, the genre of popular science was established in Ger-
many as a specifi c fi eld of cultural activity in the middle of the century.
Figures such as Emil Adolf Rossmässler came from outside the scientifi c
establishment, established journals devoted to popularizing science, re-
vered the natural history tradition, eschewed the emphasis on research,
and were more likely to adhere to Humboldt’s cosmic concept of nature
rather than to scientifi c materialism. The differences between the German
popularizers and their British counterparts are just as interesting and, in
large part, are related to the different contexts in which they worked.