The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  FROM TUESDAY to Friday, the five existing sections ran concurrent sessions from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Administrative meetings for those involved on the organizational committees were held at ten in the morning. The Senate House was the scene of the evening events, open to the public: a discussion of the aurora borealis on Monday evening (in which both Whewell and Herschel took part), a geological lecture on mineral veins on Tuesday evening, a presentation by Whewell on the tides (a new scientific endeavor for him) on Thursday. Wednesday night there was a grand fireworks display over the Cam on the grounds of King’s College, preceded by an altercation between the porter of the building, who was refusing to let in the immense crowd, and John Henslow, professor of botany, who squeezed into the gate and was promptly knocked down by the porter and detained in the Porter’s Lodge for an hour! Friday at 3:00 p.m., Trinity College hosted a cold buffet dinner for 570 people, followed by an evening concert by Maria Felicita Malibran, the renowned French-Spanish mezzo contralto. Henslow—who had apparently recovered from his fisticuffs two nights before—led a botanical barge trip up the Cam on Saturday.79 “What a week!” Herschel exclaimed to Sedgwick when it was all over.80 Jones confided to Babbage that he had hated “the bustle and pageantry and pretension” of the proceedings.81

  Although Jones had not been involved in the original conception of the British Association, he was a driving force of the Cambridge meeting. His situation had changed considerably after the publication of his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth. At the start of 1833 he had been appointed Professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London, at a much higher salary than he had earned as a curate, and had moved to London with his wife. Whewell had interceded directly with the Bishop of London to help him secure the position.82 (Whewell was soon giving him useful advice about lecturing: be clear, give specific details, and do not use that “bow-wow style in which you sometimes preach!”)83

  On Wednesday, February 27, 1833, at two in the afternoon, Jones gave his Inaugural Lecture. He had implored his friends to attend, telling Herschel that “if my friends do not grace me with their presence I shall hold a disconsolate palaver with empty benches.”84 Babbage, Herschel, and Whewell all showed up at King’s College to provide moral support. In his lecture, Jones outlined the inductive method of political economy he had laid out in his book two years earlier. The correct, inductive method of political economy, Jones instructed his audience, required both “history and statistics.” History tells an economist the causes and effects of past economic measures; statistics tells him in detail the present condition of the nations of the earth, but without revealing causes and effects.85

  British political economists could turn to numerous eminent historians, past and present, whose work provided historical facts of interest. But Britain had no society or group to facilitate the gathering and systematizing of statistical information. Here, Jones noted pointedly, economists could learn from the natural philosophers, especially those who had recently formed the British Association. “The cultivators of physical science,” he told his listeners, “have set a brilliant and useful example. There is hardly a department in the province which has not the advantage of being pursued by societies of men animated by a common object, and collecting and recording facts under the guidance of philosophical views. We may hope, surely, that mankind and their concerns will soon attract interest enough to receive similar attention; and that a statistical society will be added to the number of those which are advancing scientific knowledge of England.”86

  (Jones was, as usual, depressed after the lecture. Whewell chided him: “What amount of success will satisfy you? If you expect that the whole lecture room should rush from their seats and lift you in their arms declaring you the emperor of economists, the thing will not be done!”)87

  Whewell began plotting a way for Jones’s speech to have a lasting impact. The next month, in the midst of planning the logistics of the Cambridge meeting, Whewell wrote to Jones with an interesting proposition: “I want to talk to you about getting statistical information, [and] if the British Association is to be made subservient to that, … which I think would be well.”88 They began to plan a kind of coup d’etat of the society. This coup would rely on the presence in Cambridge of the Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet.

  Whewell had met Quetelet in Hamburg in 1829. Quetelet was doing groundbreaking work in a field he called physique sociales, or social physics. At that time Quetelet was the founding director of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (which would not be operational until several years later), a position he held until his death in 1874. Taking astronomy as his model, Quetelet was trying to fashion a method for scientifically studying men in society. He was particularly interested in the astronomer’s use of the “method of least squares,” which employed the probabilistic notion of an “error curve” to explain the existence of variations among observations of the same celestial object. Herschel, for instance, used this method extensively in his analysis of the observations of the double stars. What this method did in astronomy was to introduce the notion of a “statistical regularity” among large sets of observational data. Quetelet decided to apply this notion in a way that had never been done before, to data sets about human activities such as marriage, crime, and suicide.89

  Both Jones and Whewell had unsuccessfully implored Quetelet to attend the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1832.90 Whewell made a special effort to attract him to the Cambridge meeting, promising him comfortable rooms at Trinity during his stay. This time Quetelet did come, armed with an account of his statistical work on suicide and crime rates, gathered from a comprehensive study of the records of the French criminal courts between 1826 and 1831—the results of which would soon be published in his pioneering book, the Treatise on Man, where Quetelet presented his conception of l’homme moyen, the average man, an abstract being, defined in terms of the average of all human attributes in a given country.91 Quetelet argued that deviations from this average canceled themselves out when large numbers of instances were considered, just as deviations in large numbers of astronomical observations tended to cancel each other. The same reasoning is used today in such commonly employed expressions as “the age of the average woman at marriage,” or “the number of years of education among the average twenty-five-year-old man.”

  As there was no section of the British Association that could accommodate a paper on such topics, Jones invited Quetelet, along with Whewell, Babbage, the aged Malthus, and others, to his rooms at Caius College on the evening of June 26, and Quetelet delivered his paper there. At this gathering, Whewell and Jones announced their plan to form a “statistical section” of the British Association. The men purposely circumvented the organization’s rules by not going through the General Committee. Instead, the next morning, Babbage presented the new section—Section F—as a fait accompli to Sedgwick, the president of the association that year. (In his autobiography, published over thirty years later, Babbage characteristically takes credit for the idea and execution of creating the new section.)

  Some members of the British Association worried that allowing discussions of statistics would result in the introduction of charged political issues involving the poor laws, land reforms, and others. Politically, things remained tense in Britain. The Reform Bill had been passed by Parliament the year before, increasing the number of men eligible to vote from about 400,000 to nearly 650,000, about one in six British men; some thought the bill went too far in extending voting rights, while some felt it had not gone far enough.92 And the New Poor Law, which would force paupers into workhouses in order to receive relief, was still being debated, and would pass the following year. Sedgwick, obliged to ameliorate the situation, gave a speech to the assembled members in which he presented the new section as existing for the purpose of discussing facts and figures that could function as the “raw material to political economy and political philosophy,” without allowing discussions of politics itself, which would ar
ouse “bad passion and party animosity,” and allow the “foul demon of discord” to enter into their “Eden of philosophy.”93

  Although Sedgwick’s speech made it sound as if the Statistical Section would be confined to the mere blind collection of unconnected facts, that was certainly not the intention of Whewell and the other founding members. As Bacon had noted, and as Whewell had emphasized in his speech earlier in the week to the General Meeting, the man of science was not supposed to be like the ant, piling up facts like crumbs, but like the bee, who takes the specks of pollen, digests them, and turns them into honey. Whewell had told the assembled men of science that “facts can only become portions of knowledge as they become classed and connected … they can only constitute truth when they are included in general propositions.”94 Merely piling up facts was unproductive. What was needed instead was the gathering of these facts into laws, especially economic laws, which could be used to diagnose and treat the ills of society.

  Whewell did, however, share Sedgwick’s concern that the Statistical Section would become the stage for rancorous political debates overshadowing the scientific work—and this is precisely what happened. The Statistical Section soon became the most controversial of the sections at the yearly meetings, often the setting for angry confrontations between the speaker and his audience. At the 1835 meeting, for example, William Langton delivered a paper attacking Lord Brougham’s claim that education of the poor had increased in the past twenty-five years (it would be another forty-five years before the Education Act required all children to attend school up to the age of ten). Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting from France soon after publishing the first volume of Democracy in America, was there to witness the mêlée that broke out among some members of the crowd. Eventually the British Association resolved the problem by assigning the section meetings of the Statistical Section to small rooms, withholding grant monies, and confining the published notices of statistical papers to mere tables of numbers, thus contravening the possibility of controversial political conclusions.95

  In March 1834, Babbage and Jones—realizing that Section F would always be under the control of the British Association’s General Committee—founded the autonomous London Statistical Society (now known as the Royal Statistical Society). Although Whewell was not at the initial meeting, he was happy to be named one of the members of the council.96 But the London Statistical Society, like Section F of the British Association, witnessed its share of rancor and unruliness. Eventually it, too, tried to defuse such tensions by describing itself as concerned exclusively with facts divorced from all theory. It is not surprising that soon after this development, Whewell, Babbage, and even Jones lost interest in the society, and ceased active participation in it. Whewell explained to Quetelet that “they would go on better if they had some zealous theorists among them.… Unconnected facts are of comparatively small value.”97

  Nevertheless, the three men had sparked a new movement in England, one that would give shape to the newly forming “social sciences” as well as alter indelibly the physical sciences. Quetelet’s doctrine of a “statistical law,” with its assumption of regularities in seemingly irrational phenomena such as suicide and crime, would come to be a critical tool in the effort to reduce disorder into order by the use of analysis on large numbers of data, even data about the natural world in areas outside observational astronomy. For instance, when he devised his brilliant statistical gas law, James Clerk Maxwell used Quetelet’s formulation of the error law—he had learned of it by reading Herschel’s review of one of Quetelet’s books.98 Francis Galton would later use these same methods in his study of heredity, adding support for his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, while also, less auspiciously, pioneering the field he called “eugenics.”

  THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION meetings were eagerly anticipated by attendees and by the local pub owners, innkeepers, and managers of other locales that would be frequented by those who traveled to attend the gathering. Towns vied with each other to host the meetings, promising spacious and elegant meeting rooms, large assembly halls for the public lectures, elegant catered meals (called “ordinaries”), balls, entertainments, exhibitions, excursions, and accommodation in hotels and private houses. A combination of local pride, civic rivalry, and the desire to share in the spectacle created events that became part of the local lore.

  The British Association changed the way science was done, and not only in Britain. For the first time, science became very much a public activity. Unlike the Royal Society, which held meetings that few of its 740-odd members even bothered to attend, or the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, whose members were forced to attend, but did not number beyond several hundred, the British Association was attended by thousands—not only men of science, but also local manufacturers and noblemen, and their wives and daughters. Babbage remarked that an important benefit of the meetings was that they would encourage a wide range of people to “get a little imbued with love for science.”99 Tens of thousands of others read about the meetings in the local and national newspapers and journals.100 The general public heard of the social events, the lectures, and even the scientific papers that were read and discussed at the meetings. Those lucky enough to travel to the meetings or live in the host towns could go hear the lectures, meet the natural philosophers at the conversaziones, and partake of the many field trips that were offered. At the Bristol meeting in 1836, visitors had a smorgasbord of choices (in addition to the meetings and lectures): inspections of the shipbuilding yards, two zoological gardens, and twenty different manufactories, including gas works, an anchor foundry, a steam-engine factory, a paper plant, a confectionery, a brewery, and two sugar refineries.101

  The audience for this public display of scientific knowledge included women, hundreds of them at a time. This was in stark contrast to the usual exclusion of women from the scientific establishment at this time. They were explicitly barred from membership in the scientific societies, even the British Association. By encouraging members to bring their wives and daughters to the meetings, however, the British Association opened a crack in the door that would soon be flung wide open.

  Initially the women mainly attended the public lectures and the social events. At the first meeting in York, “not less than a hundred fashionable ladies” attended Scoresby’s lecture on magnetism, the Yorkshire Gazette reported.102 The sale of “ladies’ tickets” to the evening lectures became a major source of revenue for the association. But soon women began to infiltrate the section meetings, from which they were ostensibly barred. Before the Bristol meeting, the organizers worried that one of the section meeting rooms held only 350 people, so that “it may be necessary to enforce almost absolutely the law as to the exclusion of ladies from the sections.”103 By the next year, after the Liverpool meeting, Murchison would announce triumphantly to Harcourt that “the sections here have been excellent, and Sedgwick as president of the geological surpassed himself. He smitted the hearts of all the ladies of whom we had 300 daily in our gallery.”104

  Women had already been attending lectures at the Royal Institution, but those lectures were specifically designed for women and others unschooled in science. Jones playfully coined the word merry-miss-mology to describe the education of women at the Royal Institution, asking Whewell, still known as a ladies’ man, “Should you not like to be the first Professor and give instruction in merrymismology?”105 But their de facto (and, eventually, de jure) admission to the section meetings of the British Association granted women access to science as it was practiced by the men of science themselves. To be sure, there were uncomfortable moments, as when in the zoological section Richard Owen was forced to modify his discussion of marsupial reproduction “as delicately as possible.”106

  Another part of scientific practice, taken for granted today, that was firmly established by the British Association meetings was the habit of following the presentation of papers with vigorous discussion by scientific peers, discussion that helped fur
ther the progress of science. After the York meeting, Murchison reported to Whewell about “the highly instructive conversations which followed each paper.”107 This was not the norm at the time. Only the Geological Society had anything like this; indeed, even recently the Duke of Sussex had rejected calls for reintroducing such discussions into the Royal Society, which had discontinued them long before. The duke was afraid the result of such freedom would be the airing of petty personal disputes and other “irregularities” that would be antithetical to the scientific character of the meetings. It was not until 1845 that, under the example of the British Association, the Royal Society would begin to allow discussion of presented papers once again.108

  The British Association also pioneered the tradition of making research grants to men of science; they used funds raised by the meetings, especially the money earned from the “ladies’ tickets.” Previously it had been more usual to offer prizes for solutions to particular problems, such as the “Longitude Problem.” But grants provided money for work not yet completed, which encouraged greater participation by men of science who were not independently wealthy. Grants also encouraged innovation, “thinking outside the box,” because a recipient was not limited to solving only one preordained problem.109 Grants became a major part of the landscape of science, not only in England but even in France; by the 1840s the Royal Academy of Sciences copied the British Association and began to institute the practice of giving grants rather than prizes.110

  The Royal Society stubbornly lagged behind. In 1828 Wollaston had left money in his will for a “Donation Fund” of the Royal Society, to be used for “promoting experimental researches.” In a letter written soon before his death, Wollaston had urged the society to spend the income from the fund “liberally.” But his generous bequest remained mostly unused until the 1850s, even though by 1842 the fund was worth £4,844.111