The two decades from 1860 to 1880 were one of the most formative periods in the emergence of modern attitudes to scientific inquiry in England, in what were later to become the specialized disciplines of the natural and human sciences. At this high point of Victorian prosperity a small group of scholars established both the principal questions for future research, and the character of the institutions which were to pursue them, in increasingly professional ways, during the following century. Most of the men (for it was an overwhelmingly male community) who were involved with these developments had independent means, either as inherited wealth or as a result of their own involvement in business affairs; and in consequence they were less restricted in pursuit of their interests than many of their successors who occupied paid positions in scientific institutions and universities (Levine 1986; cf. Chapman 1998).
