Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1848) set out to prove that exact knowledge deepens rather than dispels wonder: matter and its metamorphoses, light, heat, electricity and life, each rendered with scientific fidelity and a romantic’s eye. Dickens reviewed it admiringly; the young science found in Hunt one of its first stylists.
It is the Victorian marriage of laboratory and imagination at its most sincere. Download the free EPUB and read science written as literature.