Life in Nature

An overview of the human body for a Victorian popular readership, incorporating the latest scientific insights of its day.

James Hinton (Author)

9781108000703, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

280 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.36 kg

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]