The Philosophical Breakfast Club (44 page)

Although Herschel’s hopes for photographic records of the expedition were dashed, the explorers were successful. Ross arrived at the Kerguelen Islands, an archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean, early in May 1840, in time to fulfill the plan made beforehand for simultaneous magnetic observations there and at all British and foreign observatories on May 29–30. The
Terror
’s assistant surgeon, the young Joseph Hooker—who would later go on to become one of the age’s foremost botanists, and a close friend of Charles Darwin—made important observations of the archipelago’s flora and collected specimens on the island. Ross was unable on this journey to reach the south magnetic pole; the ship got within 150 miles and then was stopped by impenetrable ice, but, using the Gaussian magnetic instruments suggested to the expedition by Herschel, Ross was able to compute the exact position of the pole to be 75°5’ south latitude and 151°45’ east longitude.

After sailing to Hobart, the ships set out on a five-month cruise within the Antarctic Circle. They met the hitherto unknown Great Ice Barrier (later named after Ross) and discovered Queen Victoria Land. Between
1842 and 1843, Ross charted part of the eastern coast of Graham Land, deep in the Weddell Sea, and then returned home via the South Shetlands and St. Helena.
⁸⁸
The south magnetic pole would not be physically reached until Douglas Mawson’s expedition in 1909.
⁸⁹

Meanwhile, Herschel and his fellow exponents of magnetic research were continuing in their attempts to persuade the government to fund the geomagnetic observatories. Having already spent £100,000 for the south polar expedition, the government was reluctant to commit more funds. Finally, in 1840, Herschel and Sabine were successful in obtaining government support for observatories in Greenwich, Dublin, Toronto, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and Van Diemen’s Land. The East India Company established observatories in Madras, Simla, Singapore, and Bombay. The Russian government agreed to establish ten observatories across its vast dominions, including one in Peking. Other cooperating observatories were erected as well, including those in Prague, Milan, Philadelphia, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Algiers, Breslau, Munich, Cadiz, Brussels, Cairo, Trivandrum, and Luknow. In all, fifty-three observatories were established throughout the world.
⁹⁰
As Whewell rather modestly put it (ignoring his own international tidal project), “Such a scheme, combining world-wide extent with the singleness of action of an individual mind, is hitherto without parallel.”
⁹¹

In 1845, directly preceding the British Association meeting, which had returned to Cambridge, a “Magnetic Conference” was held to discuss the results of the observatories and the magnetic expedition. Both Whewell and Herschel worried that the magnetic crusade had resulted in mountains of observational data but little theoretical success.
⁹²
When all the data was finally analyzed years later, however, some important results emerged.

Sabine worked methodically on the data, publishing maps of variation, dip, and intensity in 1843 and 1844. He found discrepancies between what had been observed by Ross in the field and what had been predicted by Gauss’s theory of magnetism, which held that the earth’s magnetic field was determined purely by terrestrial forces. Later, in 1852, Sabine’s wife, Elizabeth, was translating Humboldt’s masterful work of natural philosophy,
Kosmos
, into English. Sabine saw that the third volume of this work discussed the newly reported results of Heinrich Schwabe’s seventeen-year study of sunspots, which had led him to conclude that there was a ten-year cycle of maximum sunspot activity. Sabine realized
that there was a correlation between Schwabe’s observations and the timing of magnetic storms recorded at the colonial magnetic observatories. Further work on this relation—published by Sabine in 1868—led to the recognition that the earth’s magnetic field was determined, in part, by cosmic factors such as sunspots, thus disproving Gauss’s theory.
⁹³
This work also showed that William Herschel had been correct to suggest a connection between sunspots and atmospheric conditions on earth.
⁹⁴

In the third edition of his
History of the Inductive Sciences
, published in 1857, Whewell praised the magnetic campaign as “by far the greatest scientific undertaking the world has ever seen.”
⁹⁵
This may seem to be vastly overstating the case. But Whewell was thinking not only of the results for magnetic science, but of those gained by science as a whole: especially the “recognition and execution of the duty of forwarding science in general by national exertions.” What he had begun with his tide researches—international cooperation in and public funding of scientific enterprises—the magnetic crusade had continued on a grand scale never before seen.

O
N THE EVE
of the new year of 1840, John Herschel gathered with his family for their last holiday celebration at their home in Slough. The great forty-foot telescope, used by his father to discover Uranus and to peer beyond the galaxy, had been dismantled, the timbers of its mounting having become dangerously decayed. The family assembled inside the tube, where royalty and archbishops had walked so many decades before. Together they raised their talented voices in harmony, singing a “Requiem of the Forty Feet Reflector at Slough,” composed by John Herschel:

The tube was then sealed, and laid horizontally on three stone piers in the garden at Observatory House in Slough. Today nothing remains but a monument to the Herschels on Windsor Road, near where the house once stood.
⁹⁶

W
ILLIAM
W
HEWELL WAS NOW FORTY-SIX YEARS OLD
. L
ONELY
, feeling ancient, surrounded by younger men coming up as fellows at Trinity, he suddenly realized that he was no longer content with his life. He confided his despair to his old friend Hare, by now archdeacon in his comfortable living at Herstmonceux, at the end of 1840. “My inducements to stay in college diminish. Friends depart or become separated from me by change of habits. I do not make new intimacies easily, hardly at all. College rooms are no home for declining years.”
¹
It was time, Whewell felt, to marry. He began to desire the “warmth of a shared hearth.” His life at Cambridge had become “morally and spiritually unwholesome.”
²
Perhaps, like many of the fellows, Whewell had been visiting the prostitutes in Barnwell, or even in London (his discreet Victorian biographer, Isaac Todhunter, remarked in his private notes for his book on Whewell that in the 1830s “his incessant journeys to London [are] very remarkable,” suggesting some kind of illicit purpose to them).
³
But in order to marry, he would have to give up his fellowship. He had been Professor of Moral Philosophy since 1838; this position could be held by a married man, but it did not pay enough to support a family. Whewell began to consider his other options.

In December 1840, Whewell heard that George Waddington was about to leave his parish of Masham in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Waddington had been at Trinity with Whewell, first as an undergraduate and then as a fellow; the two men had gone through the process of being ordained ministers of the Church of England at the same time. Waddington, who had a reputation as a historian of some note, was appointed to the vicarage of Masham in 1834. Whewell learned that Waddington was giving up the position there to become dean of Durham. As Whewell told Hare, Masham had been “improved by commutation”—thanks to the work of Jones and his colleagues at the Tithe Office, the
position was now worth a reasonable amount of money each year, indeed it was “a tolerably good living.” Although Whewell’s professorship could be held at the same time as a parish position, Masham was nearly two hundred miles from Cambridge, so Whewell would either have to give up his lecturing or live part of the time in Cambridge, away from the parish. Previous to Whewell’s tenure, there is no record of any holder of the Moral Philosophy professorship giving lectures; Whewell, however, believed that professors should lecture, as he had argued with Babbage many times over the years. Whewell’s lectures on moral philosophy were attended by up to fifty students at a time, not bad in the days before the Moral Sciences Tripos, and when the charismatic and popular Sedgwick was getting only thirty students—who were outnumbered, sometimes, by local ladies—at his geology lectures.
⁴

Whewell asked Hare for his opinion. “Am I fit to take care of souls?” Whewell plaintively asked his friend. “Am I not too adverse to business? Too unsympathizing with common people?” Hare’s answer was measured. He agreed that Whewell appeared to need a change. When they had seen each other a year ago, Hare admitted to his friend, he did seem to be “outliving” his contemporaries at Trinity. Whewell was right, he felt, that “college rooms are not a fit home for one’s later years.” Already in the eighteenth century, the Anglican theologian George Faber had pronounced that “a fellowship is an excellent breakfast, an indifferent dinner, and a most miserable supper.”
⁵
On the other hand, Hare cautioned, it was most important to avoid an “uncongenial calling.” Hare recalled how depressed he had been during the two years he was studying law after graduating from Cambridge; he was still grateful to Whewell for “rescuing” him from his “misery” by having him invited back to Cambridge as the lecturer in Classics. Hare told Whewell frankly that “your ministry in this world seems to me to be that of a doctor, rather than a pastor; and what I should wish for you would be a post where you might fulfill that ministry—the Mastership of Trinity, a deanery, or something of that sort.” He reminded Whewell ominously that “a country parson’s life is almost infallibly one almost devoid of everything like intellectual society.”
⁶

Still, Whewell continued seriously to consider the life of a country clergyman. Over the Christmas holiday, he joined a large party from Cambridge in visiting Ely, where his friend George Peacock had been appointed dean the year before (Peacock was soon known as “the scientific
Dean”).
⁷
Jones was there as well; he wrote to Herschel that “I have been to Ely with Peacock. Whewell and Sedgwick were there and we joked and talked as in olden time—Whewell is getting (between ourselves) moody and uneasy at Cambridge and will partially leave I think as soon as a living which he likes [opens up] keeping his Professorship and taking to himself a wife—I hope he may find a good one.”
⁸
(Jones also informed Herschel that he and his colleagues had finally settled the issue of the tithes owed by Herschel for his Kent property: “I had a world of plague” about it, he confided.) On January 1, Whewell left Ely to travel to Masham, to meet with Waddington and to examine the parish for himself.

It was so unusual for a Cambridge don to travel to Masham that even the nearby Lancashire newspapers reported on Whewell’s visit.
⁹
But by February Whewell had decided not to seek the position in Masham. As he told his sister Ann, “The parish is very large, very populous, and in various ways very laborious.”
¹⁰
To Murchison’s wife, Whewell admitted, “I could not make out to my satisfaction that it would do for me or I for it; so I wait another chance.”
¹¹
Soon, another chance opened up for him.

P
ART OF
W
HEWELL’S
restlessness arose from his feeling that, as he told Hare, he had accomplished all he had wanted in his position as a fellow of Trinity. He had done his best to improve mathematical studies at the university, by helping to initiate the reforms sought by the Analytical Society decades earlier. He had completed his magisterial survey of the history of science, and had just published his major work on scientific method,
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
. As Whewell explained in his preface to the
Philosophy
, his friend Sedgwick had suggested, after reading his
History of the Inductive Sciences
, that he “ought to add a paragraph or two at the end, by way of Moral to the story.” Whewell had replied to Sedgwick that “the Moral would be as long as the story itself!”
¹²
By the “moral” of the story, Sedgwick meant the conclusions that could be drawn about scientific method from the study of the history of science. But Whewell had intended all along to draw such conclusions from that work.

Whewell had long believed that in order to prescribe how scientists ought to invent their theories, it was first necessary to study how they have, in fact, invented their theories throughout history. “Armchair” philosophizing about scientific method was useless. One criticism he had made of Herschel’s
Preliminary Discourse
in his review of the book was that
its author had presented his view of scientific method without first showing that this method had been used to make the great discoveries of the past. Whewell purposefully wrote his
History of the Inductive Sciences
before writing his
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
, and he drew attention to this fact by the subtitle of the latter work, which pointed out that the philosophy of the sciences contained within it was
Founded upon Their History
.

When the
History of the Inductive Sciences
appeared in 1837, in three volumes totaling 1,600 pages, it was the first comprehensive work on the topic ever published. In it Whewell was able to showcase his extensive knowledge of every major scientific field: astronomy, mechanics, optics, mineralogy, botany, geology, acoustics, comparative anatomy, and others. He gained this expertise not only by his own reading and researches into the topics, but also by taking advantage of his friendships with leading scientists in each of these fields, including Herschel, Faraday, Sedgwick, Airy, and Richard Owen, each of whom answered queries from Whewell on the history and present state of their respective areas.