ABSTRACT
John Phillips' Oxford career qualifies the tenacious assumption that as late as the 1870s Oxford shunned science as inferior, useless, and dehumanising. As keeper of the University Museum Phillips presided over a university science centre of unrivalled size and scope in Britain and he promoted the establishment of the Clarendon Laboratory and the University Observatory. Phillips' career thus illuminates the nature of the Smithian inheritance; but it also brings into sharp relief the difficulties of making a career in science in nineteenth-century Britain. Phillips' last big work, his Geology of Oxford, praised William Smith's 1815 map, his subsequent county maps, his still useful knowledge of the fossils of the fuller's earth rock, and for taking the first step towards using zones of ammonites to demarcate liassic deposits. Phillips' skill with measuring instruments for surveying was certainly derived from his uncle who encouraged him to invent new devices such as his lithographic press.
