In 1875 David Page, geologist and enthusiast for intellectual culture, published a pamphlet-length plea for an increase in the number of field clubs and science associations. In his petition Page deployed the well-worn themes that had marked countless calls made in Victorian towns entreating local publics to participate in scientific pursuits. Botany, geology and meteorology among other subjects were recommended to Page's readers as physically and mentally invigorating pastimes. For Page, natural history, more than other forms of intellectual culture, offered a stimulating distraction from the debilitating effects of routine urban existence. Page was careful to point out the dangers of narrow scientific professionalism, a condition incompatible with ‘the duties of brotherly sympathy, honest manliness, and good citizenship, which render life sweet and society enjoyable’. Recreative science, on the other hand, united the pursuit of general happiness and individual intelligence and provided a hopeful way forward amidst signs of social decay.

Page's estimation of the social benefits of a widespread and collective interest in natural science was shared by the Revd Charles Kingsley. In a preface to a series of lectures on ‘town geology’ first published in 1872 Kingsley presented the political advantages associated with diffusing a scientific spirit among Britain's urban classes. The ‘dream’ that Kingsley offered to his readers was of a ‘true working aristocracy’ that functioned according to the habits of mind acquired through active participation in scientific work. The patient study of town geology (or any other branch of natural history) would supply the basis for the freedom, equality and brotherhood, which state government could not by itself provide. As ‘a student of society and history’ Kingsley urged his readers to heed the prognosis – inductively derived – that ‘power will pass more and more, if all goes healthily and well, into the hands of scientific men’.

The testimonies of Page and Kingsley typify a pervasive rhetoric attached to attempts at enlarging participation in scientific pursuits.

The field excursion of the third annual meeting of the Northern Scientific and Literary Societies held in Banff in 1883 provided a public spectacle for the town. The Banffshire Journal recorded that:

The rendezvous for the excursionists, the Fife Arms Hotel, provided a grand civic backdrop to the spectacle being adjacent to, and in architectural competition with, the Town House. Fieldwork, for all the accompanying rhetoric of escape from the town, could provide a ceremony that drew crowds and provoked, as the report testified, public excitement. What was more often considered an event organized for members of a natural history society became a public rite that transposed science into the language of civic pride and progress.

This chapter offers an account of the public lives of Scottish natural history societies in the civic realm and examines the ways in which their activities were orientated towards local civil society. The societies’ imprint on a local urban environment was registered in numerous ephemeral and more permanent ways. Here I investigate the various sites, occasions and advertising strategies by which the societies were made recognizable and accessible to a local public. The chapter's first section examines conversaziones and exhibitions. Society members regarded such events as useful for recruitment purposes and as a way of fulfilling educational goals. Yet conversaziones were defined not only by the organizers but also by the attendees. As a common cultural event, the meanings attached to conversaziones thus extended beyond those associated with the aims and objectives of natural history societies. The second section looks more closely at the fundraising strategies employed by the societies beyond the small income generated by regular entrance fees and annual subscriptions.

Scientific societies, unlike short-lived evangelical awakenings, were for the Catholic controversialist and botanist James Britten a more permanent sign of a maturing scientific nation. For Britten the welcome maturing of science signalled by the establishment of local societies was explained by a longer national history of the effective diffusion of a scientific mentality. Such sentiments were shared by commentators otherwise separated by serious theological disagreement. Charles Kingsley, whose infamous spat with John Henry Newman put him firmly in an opposing religious camp, shared Britten's appraisal of scientific societies. In a lecture delivered to the Officers of the Royal Artillery in 1872 on the subject of ‘the study of natural history for soldiers’, Kingsley opined that a naturalists’ field club supplied ‘sound inductive habits of mind’ as well as promoting physical well being and manly moral virtues. Yet appeals to universal benefits, to a scientific zeitgeist or to national progress do not exhaust the reasons offered for the founding of a local scientific society. This chapter introduces Scottish natural history societies active between c. 1831–1900 by recovering three different but related perspectives discernable in contemporary accounts of their foundation and growth. The first perspective, epitomized by Britten and Kingsley, is that of commentators who offered a portrayal of Scottish natural history societies which pictured them as bodies contributing to national and universal scientific progress. The second, more local, perspective was propounded by founding members who promoted the social utility of associational fieldwork as a cultural and scientific pursuit. A third and related perspective, accenting responsibility for the welfare of the host town, presented natural history societies as part of a wider array of institutions committed to civic improvement through the education of local citizens.

In 1882, James Geikie, member of the Geological Survey and resident of Perth, used the platform afforded him as President of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science (PSNS) to sketch the traits of the ‘true naturalist’. His counterpoint was the ‘mere collector of curiosities’ or the ‘pseudo-naturalist’ and the museums which had resulted from the ‘mania of collecting’. Collections composed of every kind of curio might evoke ‘occult musings’ but they could not impart knowledge of the ‘wonderful adaptations and harmonies of nature’. In contrast, the true naturalist systematically uncovered the ordered laws of nature. Geikie's ideal was not ‘a mere one-idea'd man … but a philosophical specialist whose mind is open to light from all quarters’. As such individuals also demonstrated, the cultivation of one of the several subjects making up the natural sciences could ‘quicken the observing faculty, sharpen the reasoning powers, and expand the imagination’. In short, the disciplined but ‘philosophical’ study of natural science was, for Geikie, ‘admirably adapted … for the purposes of self-culture’.

Chapters 2 and 3 have indicated the ways in which associational natural history was construed as part of mid- to late nineteenth-century Scottish civil society. Presenting the natural history society as a significant local cultural enterprise involved, it has been argued, a complex set of negotiations between conceptions of scientific work and conduct and activities deemed appropriate and relevant for civic culture. This chapter, in keeping with the emphasis on science as civic culture, aims to further situate the activities of natural history societies by looking at the kind of individual who epitomized the ‘true’ or civic naturalist. In particular, it examines the ways in which representations of prominent members resisted a characterization of the naturalist as ‘neither particularly godly, nor particularly virtuous, nor particularly polite’ a characterization that others have argued was on the ascendancy in mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain.

Scottish natural history societies, situated in civic culture and orientated towards a local public, were also significantly shaped by connections with a wider scientific community. One ruling objective of the societies, to explore and catalogue local natural history, was of potential interest to a scientific as well as a local audience. In order to render such activities useful to science, certain procedures and lines of investigation were promoted to secure scientific credibility. The recommendation of certain methods and projects was supplemented by fostering links, formal and informal, with other scientific bodies and by creating a library of scientific texts to keep pace with wider developments. Such links in terms of strength, number and duration varied from society to society and in ways connected with, but also distinct from, the relations between naturalists’ associations and local civic society. This chapter examines the ways in which the societies managed their self-styled scientific transactions. Particular attention is given to the basic organizational features that connected the societies to a wider scientific world, and to the published output of members who were particularly concerned with their society's scientific reputation.

The chapter is divided into four parts. The first deals with the relationship between Scottish natural history societies and emerging scientific specialisms. This discloses something of the geography of disciplinary affinity as manifested by the scientific activities of society members. The section demonstrates that local contingencies and individual interests meant the scientific pursuits of society members tended to cluster around certain specialisms. Before 1883, for example, the Natural History Society of Glasgow was an important centre for Scottish ornithology. Examining these dominant interests in the light of wider disciplinary contexts situates further the scientific ambitions of the societies in the world of mid- to late Victorian scientific endeavour. Part two examines informal links set up between societies and other scientific constituencies.

In 1885, two years after Hewett Cottrell Watson's tirade against the error-strewn reports of provincial natural history societies, the President of the Aberdeen Natural History Society James Trail, Professor of Botany at the University of Aberdeen, and the Secretary, John Roy, Aberdeen schoolmaster, published a paper in the Society's Transactions entitled ‘Additions and Corrections to Topographical Botany for the Counties from Forfar to Elgin Inclusive’. The errors and gaps in Watson's own publication were pointed out by two botanists committed to the kind of provincial society that Watson had attacked. Trail and Roy were careful to correct Watson either on the basis of ‘personal investigation’ or ‘information supplied on trustworthy evidence’. In addition to contributing data advancing botanical science, the two provincial botanists reasserted the value of local naturalists’ societies to science.

This book has argued that natural history societies were shaped by an overriding aim to simultaneously interest local publics and contribute to science. This chapter, building on Chapter 5, examines further the kinds of scientific aspirations exemplified by Trail and Roy without losing sight of more exoteric cultural concerns. By looking more closely at how members worked to establish the scientific reputation of their societies, alternative sets of negotiations between social and scientific agendas are brought into view. Alongside such locally negotiated collaborations, the tensions created between the work of the members to present their societies as significant bodies in local civil society and their efforts to offer work that was scientifically credible will also become increasingly apparent.

The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section takes two particular research routines central to the scientific efforts of the societies – recording and mapping – and examines at the level of scientific praxis the tensions generated between epistemic and moral imperatives. The second section recounts an individual scientific field project, namely the investigation of the Clava shell-bed near Inverness.

Introduction

In a polemical missive published in the Freeman's Journal on 20 June 1845, the popular science lecturer and controversialist Daniel William Cahill (1796–1864) addressed the Roman Catholic bishops of Ireland on the subject of geology. In his lengthy epistle Cahill set out to prove that ‘more virulent misrepresentations of Catholic doctrine … are circulated by the geologists of our times than any of our bitterest opponents’. Quoting from Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Leveson Vernon Harcourt's Doctrine of the Deluge among other sources Cahill's aim was to reveal the anti-Catholic bias of geological texts of all stripes. What concerned Cahill most was the possibility that Ireland's Catholic population would be exposed to similar prejudices in the lecture hall. Using the kind of highly-charged rhetoric that became his trademark Cahill announced that, ‘the auditory of a scientific lecturer are, as it were, disarmed: being not prepared for the attack they offer no resistance and the wound inflicted reaches the heart at once – it is fatal’. For Cahill this demonstrated why it was necessary that Roman Catholic students should be taught science by Roman Catholic professors (Cahill assured his readers that he had never heard professors of his own creed use science for sectarian ends). In arguing thus Cahill echoed the widely held views that scientific speech should be free from political or religious import and that the lecture room more than the reading room shaped public opinion.

In 1865 John Gray, a founding member of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, published a sketch of the celebrated eighteenth-century Scottish naturalist, the Revd David Ure. In his potted biography Gray cast Ure as a heroic explorer fully equipped for the scientific investigation of local natural history. Ure, Gray noted, entered the field with,

In Gray's telling Ure's life provided a ‘romance of improvement’ in which fieldwork played an important part. Ure overcame not just the elements but also, in his single-minded pursuit of scientific truth, ignorance of nature and nature's God. In this way Gray's account reflected a widely shared set of assumptions about fieldwork which, as a moral as well as a scientific pursuit, aided the development of a sound mind and a healthy body.

As the example of Ure demonstrates, excursions with the purpose of exploring local natural history had a longer history and the outdoor work of nineteenth-century natural history societies participated in a rich and venerable tradition of fieldwork. David Allen, by identifying the earliest mentions of specialist equipment, outlets for publication and institutional supports, has uncovered fieldwork's rich and diverse past. In the eighteenth-century, fieldwork as a social rather than solitary pursuit received impetus from the ‘herbarizing’ associated with the Society of Apothecaries and from the need to supply a growing number of botanic gardens. Field excursions were employed from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to teach natural history at the University of Edinburgh and, later, at other British universities.

In 1896, J. T. Merz wrote of ‘the individual greatness, but also the isolation of English men of science and their discoveries’. For Merz, it was only in the final third of the century that the ‘machinery of science’ exemplified by French institutions and German universities were more widely developed in England. Before this England ‘possessed no well-trained army of intellectual workers’ needed to carry forward the pioneering work of the individual genius. Although Merz suggested that science in Scotland had benefited from a more continental university system, a successful publishing industry and well-run parochial schools, it was Scottish individuals and not institutions that held Merz's attention. Scottish lovers of nature like Hugh Miller, Thomas Edward and David Robertson, along with their English counterparts, were portrayed as nursing new sciences like geology and zoology ‘in their unpretentious infancy’. Merz's stress on individual genius and his conception of scientific method as ‘exact and mathematical’ was in keeping with other commentators who, from the 1850s, had increasingly stressed the ‘fortunate cast of intellect’ and theoretical knowledge required to do advanced scientific work. While he still saw a role at the end of the nineteenth century for the ‘scientific amateur’ he defined this type of worker as a heroic individual producing novel ideas.

Six years after Merz's reflections on English (and Scottish) science were made, evolutionist, geographer and city planner Patrick Geddes offered a more positive assessment of the past contributions and future possibilities of associational natural history. Speaking to the newly-formed Dunfermline Naturalists’ Society, Geddes pointed to the example of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science with its regional museum (‘the best in the country’) and the devotion of its members to the cause of local science. The Perthshire Society epitomized for Geddes the advantages of provincial science not only for increasing knowledge of local flora and fauna but for training citizens for a new age.