A word on Victorian scientists for the introduction.

The scientist figure is the perfect vehicle for this kind of realist experiment.  As Jack Meadows claims in The Victorian Scientist, "History textbooks will tell you that the origins of modern science are to be found in the seventeenth century.  In terms of the basic ideas, this is quite true.  But, for the building of the modern scientific community, the nineteenth century is the key period.  ...that was when scientists became professionals with a significant role in society" (Meadows 1).  Scientists occupied a new and not entirely accepted profession.  Meadows goes on in his first chapter to trace the early educational lives of many of the century's most notable scientists, and shows how many of them were practicing science as hobbies because the classical education in the liberal arts was more valued than chemistry, for example, which was often called "useless" by public school teachers.