To read the geological work of John Ruskin from the early 1860s until the mid-1880s is to look at a marginalized science through the lens of a marginal – and, ultimately, marginalized – practitioner. The inception of the dense, professional Geological Magazine in 1864 does show that able work was being done by an increasingly self-aware international community. But while geology was not being practised less, its significance in Victorian scientific culture was diminishing. Not only the question of evolution, but questions about the nervous system, solar power, sociology and the relation between mind and body began to edge geology out of its former place. The science which had fed controversy about the age of the earth, the historical accuracy of the Bible and the origin and evolution of life began to shift to a science of filling informational gaps. Geology's leading practitioners certainly resisted being relegated to the sidelines. As the Oxford geologist John Phillips lectured to the British Association in 1864: