ABSTRACT
The thallium years were the period when Crookes honed his literary skills and expanded his editorial horizons. He had got on well with Samuelson, whose own ambitions had expanded from the monthly, provincially oriented Popular Review of Science to a quarterly, metropolitan publication that would do for science what the heavily quarterlies had always done for politics, literature and religion. While Samuelson was confident in having contacts in the fields of biology and natural history, in Crookes he found someone who had the growing confidence of the physicalscience community and who shared his aspiration to create a journal that would ‘take the same position in science that the great quarterlies do in literature’.1 Accordingly, in September 1863 Samuelson asked Crookes to join him in the editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Science, the first number of which he proposed to publish in January 1864. Crookes jumped at the opportunity. It would benefit him financially and at the same time bring him into contact with a larger section of the scientific community than did Chemical News.
