ABSTRACT
In 1899, the Belfast merchant and naturalist Thomas Workman (1843–1900) took as the subject of his Presidential address to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society ‘incentives for the study of natural history’. In his opening remarks he noted that despite the ‘tremendous development’ represented by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species science, like a traveller entering a spiral tunnel, appeared to have lost its way. Workman was nevertheless confident that looking back at the end of the century the onward and upward course of scientific knowledge was now evident giving grounds for optimism at the cusp of a new era. What was more, the rewards of ‘struggling on towards the light’ of scientific truth would be truly epochal. 2
