Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain. Proliferating from a mere handful to many hundreds of titles, they catered to audiences ranging from gentlemanly members of metro...

Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from with infallible certainty – "Show me the bone, and I will describe the animal!" Paleontologists such as Ge...