290 Thurs and Numbers
newspaper readers.”^32 For champions of science, such conditions could
appear to be prime breeding grounds for error. One observer worried about
“plausibly written advertisements,” particularly for medicines, that falsely
invoked science and thus threatened to dupe and unwary public with
pseudoscientifi c claims.^33 The battle between science and pseudoscience
in the press occasionally produced a call to arms among professional prac-
titioners. In 1900, the president of the AAAS recognized in his annual
address that while scientists’ “principle business is the direct advance-
ment of science, an important, though less agreeable duty, betimes, is the
elimination of error and the exposure of fraud.”^34
As the invocation of pseudoscience began to proliferate in the emerg-
ing gaps between the scientifi c and popular, it also started to appear with
greater frequency along another emerging distinction, namely the one
between the physical and social sciences. Encouraging this boundary was
an increasing tendency to link science with physical nature, a move that
often left the study of humans in a kind of limbo. One character in a
serialized story originally published in the British Contemporary Review
and later reprinted for American audiences in Appleton’s Monthly lamented
that, though potentially important, social science was “at present not a
science at all. It is a pseudo- science.”^35 Sometimes, the harshest critics
were social- science practitioners themselves, a fact that might indicate
some small measure of anxiety about the status of their fi eld and the need
to root out unacceptable practices. In 1896, the American economist-
cum- sociologist Edward A. Ross claimed that ethics was a pseudoscience
“like theology or astrology” because it sought to combine the mutually
exclusive perspectives of the individual and the group. Albion W. Small,
holder of the fi rst American chair in sociology (at the University of Chi-
cago), asserted, with a nod to the growing boundary between the scientifi c
and popular, that his own fi eld was “likely to suffer long from the assump-
tions of pseudo- science” because “sociologists are no more immune than
other laymen against popular scientifi c error.” Still others charged that
social pseudoscience, particularly in economics, was misusing the tools of
physical science, concealing “its emptiness behind a breastwork of math-
ematical formulas.”^36
Still, it was discussion of science and religion that seemed to gener-
ate the most invocations of pseudoscience during the late 1800s. A large
amount of pseudoscientifi c rhetoric spilled out of the contemporary de-
bate over evolution and its implications. In 1887, Thomas Henry Hux-
ley himself published an article entitled “Scientifi c and Pseudo- Scientifi c
Realism,” the fi rst salvo in an extended exchange between Huxley and
George Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyll, an outspoken opponent of