Life in Nature [Paperback]

An overview of the human body for a Victorian popular readership, incorporating the latest scientific insights of its day.This 1862 book on the human body by the English surgeon and popular science writer James Hinton is an example of how authors and publishers responded to the growing middle-class interest in scientific discoveries during the Victorian period. It will appeal to historians of Victorian culture and science.This 1862 book on the human body by the English surgeon and popular science writer James Hinton is an example of how authors and publishers responded to the growing middle-class interest in scientific discoveries during the Victorian period. It will appeal to historians of Victorian culture and science.Life in Nature, first published in 1862, is a series of papers by the nineteenth-century English surgeon and popular science writer James Hinton. About a third of the material, though revised and reworked for this book, had appeared previously under the title 'Physiological Riddles' in the Cornhill Magazine, in which Hinton explained biological phenomena for non-scientific readers. Hinton wrote this thirteen-chapter book to present a concise overview of the human body, informed by the latest scientific insights, that would be more easily intelligible for the general population than the scientific physiological data of his day. His intention was also to demonstrate the similarity between patterns occurring in the organic world and in the rest of nature. This book will be of value to historians of Victorian culture and science as an example of how authors and publishers responded to the growing middle-class interest in scientific discoveries.Introduction; 1. Of function; 2. Of nutrition; 3. Of nutrition (continued); 4. Of living forms; 5. Of living forms (continued); 6. Is life universal; 7. The living world; 8. Nature and man; 9. The phenomenal and the true; 10. Force; 11. The organic and the inorganic; 12. The life of man; 13. Conclusion; Appendix.