Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (review)

It is a scholarly problem that will seemingly never be solved: what do we call those practices that we no longer consider sciences? Starting with Roger Cooter's foundational The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science (1984), there have been a number of serious scholarly books in the history of science dealing with the these practices and, necessarily, the category and nomenclatural problems they present. These works offer a variety of terms for the practices they explore, including pseudoscience, popular science, and the alternative sciences. As this field of study has matured, scholars have subjected these terms to rigorous critique for the ways in which they do not take the scientific value of these practices and their practitioners seriously in their historical context. By falsifying the practices or rendering them peripheral or unscholarly through nomenclature, any historical investigation of their import and value is curtailed at the outset. Some of the most significant works in the field, including Alison Winter's Mesmerized (1998) and James Secord's Victorian Sensation (2000) deal with the problem by demonstrating the historical debates around scientific authority and situating their objects of study within these debates.

Sherrie Lynn Lyons's book finds itself awkwardly situated within this body of literature. Through a series of interesting case studies, Lyons seeks to subject the historical account itself to reckoning, explaining why some sciences have been codified as such while others were banished to the margins. By examining these practices, she seeks to demonstrate that in their historical context the designation of evidence as legitimate was neither inevitable nor obvious. Lyons's marginal sciences include the study of sea serpents, phrenology, and spiritualism, all of which she contrasts with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as an example of a heretical science that ultimately succeeded. All four practices and their practitioners drew on overlapping evidence and even had some common philosophical perspectives. These similarities, she claims, offer evidence that it is not only the subject of study but its social context that determines the status of a practice. It is difficult, she notes, to determine the scientific value of a set of discoveries within their historical moment, an argument she supports by exploring the current controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology and the fossil record.

Lyons seeks to demonstrate that it is the interpretation and evaluation of evidence, not just the evidence itself, that confers scientific status upon an area of investigation. Interpretation and evaluation are of course influenced by a variety of considerations, of which efficacy and rigor are only a small contribution among a broad host of social, political, philosophical, and religious factors. None of Lyons's claims concerning the role of context in creating authority are surprising or particularly controversial in the history of science, particularly Victorian science. The phrenological and spiritualist ground has been carefully explored by Cooter, Secord, Winter, and others including Robert Darnton, Janet Oppenheim, and Alex Owen. These works offer a depth of primary research and analytical insight that Lyons's case-study approach does not, a problem compounded by a heavy reliance on secondary sources for evidence and images.

The awkwardness of this book in relation to other works on similar themes emerges from Lyons's more teleological approach to scientific discovery. Though she challenges narratives of inevitability around the conferral of scientific status, seeking instead to show the complicated factors contributing to what ultimately counts as valid and efficacious evidence, she undermines her own claims to take Victorian science on its own terms by pronouncing judgment on both her historical actors and the historical record. In her analysis of phrenology, for example, Lyons critiques Franz Gall's methodology based on contemporary scientific standards, noting that "several serious methodological problems existed in his work" (60). Her narrative is shaped by her understanding of science as "self-correcting," a practice that provides us with an...