The Victorian Age was unquestionably the great age of physical science. It was not only the number and quality of the scientific men whose working lives were covered by this period that were responsible for this--although no period in history makes a braver show--but it was due also to the fact that the scientific discoveries of that age were often of the kind that rouses a vast amount of public attention. The attention of a cultured minority was no new thing in the history of science. Newton’s discoveries, largely through the influence of his indefatigable populariser Voltaire, speedily became, in a more or less adequate form, the common property of the cultured part of Europe. But from the time of Newton to that of Davy there was no such general attention paid to science; England and the Continent largely lost touch, even technical students working in comparative isolation, so that the great French advances in Newtonian philosophy were not appreciated for several years in England, and the cultured public in England itself no longer considered the intelligent observation of scientific progress to be one of its chief duties. It never did regain this outlook; science, becoming increasingly technical, became more and more completely the affair of a small and specialised class, until, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was the most dissociated of intellectual activities. The great recrudescence of general interest in science was brought about by the discovery that this dissociation was merely a consequence of lack of attention, and that, in fact, scientific discovery was not unconnected with the major interests of mankind.