What's all this about then?

Among the many things I find fascinating are science, books and history. This blog is a place where I will indulge myself with these things like a geek with a keyboard and a net connection.

Look! It's an old book.

Some years ago while browsing an antique book store I found a small, well loved volume that I instantly fell in love with and bought. It's smaller than modern paperbacks and fits nicely in the hand even though it runs to almost 500 pages. The lightweight blue hardback cover is slightly embossed and the spine bears the gilded inscription "SCIENTIFIC DIALOGUES — BY THE REV^D J. JOYCE — COMPLETE AND ILLUSTRATED WITH 200 — WOODCUTS". Above the title is an image of a train in full steam, below is a device which could be a map or compass surrounded by four sailing ships. The full title given on the title page is longer and more descriptive yet but we shall get to that in a bit. It has the wonderfully uneven page size of old books that makes you realise just how recently absolutely everything was done by hand; easy to forget in our completely automated and industrial age.


I say recently but this book is old, really old. Over 150 years certainly but it's hard to say for sure, there is no printed date in any of the normal places although it does have a hand written owner's name and the date of August 15^th 1857. The Dialogues were initially printed in six separate volumes at the very beginning of the 19^th century. Jeremiah Joyce's entry in the 1885 edition of the Dictionary Of National Biography gives publication in 1807. However the 1815 edition of volume 3 has a dedication by the author dated at 1802. It was updated and reprinted many times including a Welsh translation in 1851 (some 35 years after the Reverend Joyce's death). Apparently the Dialogues were still in use in the 1890s. While the author was not alive during the reign of Queen Victoria this was most definitely a book that was read by a great many Victorians, I can feel justified in the name Scientific Victorian for this project.

This is how books should look; used and friendly.

The book is, as its title suggests, a series of conversations. These conversations are between the author and two of his children, Emma and Charles; they very politely ask sensible questions and he very politely responds with educational answers. Socrates would have been proud of this fine book. The language seems strange (and at times humorous) to my modern sensibilities, that's part of its charm. What I find most interesting is where the science is horribly wrong from our understanding, this demonstrates to us exactly how the scientific method works over time and it's a wonderful thing.

My plan is to scan and transcribe each of these conversations into a post where I'll add my own thoughts, sometimes even touching on the science. There are 140 conversations in the book, this could take a while, if I do one a week that's almost 3 years of work.

While doing my research for starting this project I discovered that the author was something of an interesting character beyond writing this book. I shall look at that a bit in the next post.

Also, I don't claim to know everything. If I get anything wrong then please point it out and give references (and no, wikipedia isn't always right)