ABSTRACT
In a perceptive article in 1997, David Allen wrote how, in Britain, geology had become “the lost limb” of natural history, and “slipped out of touch with zoology and botany”, and yet how little had been “written on this massive and far-reaching split”.1 He dated the division as between “the arrival of Huttonian theory [1785-1795]”, which first “wrenched geology loose”, and “the middle of the last century [1850]”, when the divorce became final. Thomas Beddoes worked across this divide, which has helped his activities across natural history to be neglected, in favour of his work in the more un-natural science of chemistry. As a result, geology has remained the only one of the many scientific worlds in which Beddoes was active not to have been previously analysed.
