ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the individual protagonists, the sensibilities of the Gentlemen of Science of the British Association and the politics of Oxford, both church and university, all interacted to make it necessary for knowledge of the discussion to be, if not suppressed. By the early twentieth century, along with the 1874 British Association Belfast presidential address by John Tyndall, the events of 1860 had come to be seen as one of the milestones in the process of the transformation of natural philosophy into natural science free from theological fetters. The discussion was an ‘open clash between Science and the Church’ and that the ‘importance of the Oxford meeting lay in the open resistance that was made to authority’. The leadership of the British Association has only ever had the loosest control over the content of the papers which are read to sections which maintained a high degree of autonomy and sometimes de facto independence.
