I’m about halfway through Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Holmes uses the stories of an inter-related set of individual British scientists: the aristocratic botanist and administrator Joesph Banks, the German emigre astronomer William Hershel, and the romantic populist chemist and inventor Humphry Davy, and uses their stories to tie together social change, art, science and the personal lives of scientists in a vivid, rich way. He writes that he is describing the ‘second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called romantic science.’ Its a fantastic book, which I highly recommend.
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