ABSTRACT
The controversies that characterized the early years of Nature were emphasized by Jack Meadows in his biography of Norman Lockyer, Nature’s founding editor. As a leading publisher of science books Macmillan could expect the broad support of the scientific community. His impressive list of contributors published in the second issue advertised Nature’s claim to scientific authority. Deep scientific and religious divisions between a group of ‘North British’ physicists and engineers and the London advocates of scientific naturalism, most notably the X Club, have recently been identified by Crosbie Smith. The X-Club members had already realized that a purely scientific journal would not reach a sufficiently broad public and they had access to other journals that did reach at least the wider intellectual elite. In the 1870s the reputation of the recently deceased Scottish experimental philosopher James David Forbes became a third issue over which the two groups disputed each other’s claims to scientific authority.
