ABSTRACT
The Navy provided significant career opportunities in science, and Knight identified the beginnings of the professionalisation of science in the civilian naturalists and astronomers who accompanied the Navy’s Arctic expeditions during the 1820s, along with what he saw as the opposite development, the training of naval officers to carry out scientific research. The Navy may have had relatively little to do with the aspect of professionalisation-rapid specialisation as esoteric technical languages developed and the various sciences became demarcated as areas of specific knowledge and expertise. Although their other professional loyalties, as officers of the Navy, might have presented complications, in practice the Navy can be seen also to have contributed to Morrell’s fifth point about the professionalisation of science–the development of group-solidarity and self-consciousness among scientists – by playing such a large part in some of the scientific societies.
