Tyndall, Draper, and “Eastern” Religions

Newspaper cartoon from 1875 depicting Draper wearing Eastern costume

By Bernard Lightman When John Tyndall, well known physicist and superintendent of the prestigious Royal Institution, delivered his “Belfast Address” in 1874 as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science he touched off a storm of controversy that lasted for several years.  The lecture was a tour de force, covering the entire […]

“The most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell”

By Sylvia Nickerson Radicalism and science at the publisher John Chapman In the latter nineteenth century several British doctors, philosophers and naturalists embraced scientific principles as the ones upon which society should best form itself for the future. The theory of evolution, the atomic theory of matter and the theory of the conservation of energy […]