ABSTRACT
The loss-making Scientific Opinion would soon be taken over by the English Mechanic, while Nature, of course, would go on to become the international benchmark for modern science publishing. The advent of such specialist periodicals in the late nineteenth century, and the founding of Nature in particular, has often been assumed to signal the commencement of what Robert M. Young has called the 'fragmentation of the common intellectual context'. The miscellaneous nature of most nineteenth-century periodicals, whether politically influential journals of the Romantic period such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine or Victorian family-oriented shilling monthlies such as the Cornhill Magazine, provided a textual space in which scientific articles appeared alongside poetry, short stories and instalments of serial fiction. The Fortnightly Review was, paradoxically, neither fortnightly nor a review. Founded in 1865, it shifted to a less-demanding monthly schedule in the following year, and, from the very beginning, published freestanding articles that made no pretence about being reviews of recent books.
