Britain’s Victorian era — defined by the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901 — was a time of great scientific discovery. In this period, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection laid the groundwork for evolutionary science and all of modern biology, while Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism set the stage for the discoveries of Albert Einstein and other great physicists of the 20th century. But the Victorian age was also marked by some scientific beliefs that were, shall we say, a bit less theoretically sound. In fact, some of the commonly held ...Read More