The age of wonder : how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science /Richard Holmes.

Described as a 'relay race of scientific stories' Richard Holmes has captured the inner lives of the men and women of science at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. Beginning with the botanist Joseph Banks who joined Captain Cook on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds, other voyages of discovery - astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical swiftly follow. Two scientific lives dominate the book: that of William Herschel and Humphry Davy, in this extraordinary evocation of the Romantic age.