Science without a head; or, the Royal Society dissected / By One of the 687 F.R.S.---sss [i.e. A.B. Granville].

  • Granville, A. B. (Augustus Bozzi), 1783-1872.
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Science without a head; or, the Royal Society dissected / By One of the 687 F.R.S.---sss [i.e. A.B. Granville]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sundry charges brought against scientific men, are individuals whose talents and recorded exertions in behalf of English science gainsay their querulous lays against it—nor are we less certain that a few at least, of the inditers of violent as well as moderate letters anonymously inserted in the public journals on this subject, might be quoted as examples of doctrines the reverse of those which they are straining their throats to preach to the world. How then are such para¬ doxes to be explained ? The problem will be solved in the present Expostulation. There is, however, another precious production, on the same side of the argument, which demands a separate notice in this place, and that a brief and a final one. The question of the decline of English science has been taken up as the subject of a leading article by that superannuated good old dame the Quarterly, whose attacks are real caresses, and whose encomiums damn for ever the character of an author— by the same superannuated dame who urged onward the wretched and imbecile Polignac in his career of folly with her approbation of measures, for the advocating of which the toothless lady would have risked her skin had she dared to recommend them at home—by the same superannuated dame, in fine, who having predicted to political fools the success of measures which failed as soon as predicted, immediately sent forth a second diatribe against the wise and the 'prudent (there is the rub) of another country, to prove that though success had not, it ought still to have followed the measures of the Carlists. The leading article of the old lady (who is “ sun-burnt and not worth the splinter of a lance”), in which she has undertaken to exhibit, in all its glaring defor¬ mities, our wretched condition as a scientific nation, is remarkable (no new feature truely in the Quarterly) for the total absence of all information on the subject under consi¬ deration, for the ignorance it betrays, or the suppression