part0027

The supreme and absolute power of the Church may have been gone by the time Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain, but religious faith and belief were far from it. Europe remained mostly divided between forms of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, both of which had been officially separated from the inner workings of governments and monarchies. Britain, under Queen Victoria, prided itself on having cultivated an ideal balance between the love of God and the pursuit of science. In addition, it was the era of the British Empire, during which Great Britain became a colonial power as great as Spain had been during the Age of Discovery. Queen Victoria—and more importantly, her government—ruled over England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and parts of Africa.

Great Britain was the wealthiest and most industrialized nation in Europe. It was also taking steps to establish a better form of democratic election concerning the monarchy’s government. The Great Reform Act of 1832 reorganized the divisions of England and Wales so that their representatives could no longer be elected by means of the largest landowners, making an extra 250,000 men eligible to vote. [176] Scotland and Ireland followed suit in the same manner, greatly improving the influence the middle and lower classes had on government and policies.

Perhaps one of the most impressive changes in Britain during that era was the population increase, which exploded during the years of Victoria’s reign, which lasted from 1837 to 1901. [177] There were about 13.9 million people in the kingdom when Queen Victoria first took the throne and as many as 32.5 million in the year she died. There are multiple posited reasons for this increase, including better science and health care, improving wages, and a trend toward large families. Also, the birth rate improved while the mortality rate declined, and most of this was thanks in some way to scientific endeavors.

Science battled on against religion in an endless war for supremacy, but science could not be stopped, even by the flocks of moralists that lived in Victorian Britain. Discoveries by Charles Darwin, an English naturalist by profession, shocked and horrified a great deal of people before they were accepted by mainstream science. It was his manuscript in particular, On the Origin of Species , that caused outrage by Christians against the new idea of biological evolution. In those pages, Darwin carefully outlined his research on various species of birds and mammals in the Galapagos Islands.

Darwin, educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had become interested in the work of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck while at school. Lamarck’s studies in botany and zoology during the previous century had cemented Darwin’s belief that the characteristics of one plant or animal could be inherited by its seedlings or offspring. It was a fascinating study that could be used to help explain how certain varieties of food crops had come to change slowly over time from their original forms. For Charles Darwin, it explained even more about the natural world.

Darwin’s journey to the Galapagos Islands introduced him to dozens of species he had either never seen before in person or which he had never even heard of. The geographical isolation of the islands provided the perfect environment in which those animals, birds, and insects—all presumably introduced to the island as exotic species—could find new means to meet their basic needs. Over time, they changed slightly to adapt to their new home but retained the overall appearance of their ancestors. Darwin noticed a variety of birds, for example, whose beaks had changed to better extract nourishment from exotic food sources. Examples were explained in plain terms in his book so the average reader could understand. Animals changed to adapt to their changing environments, Darwin argued, and the motivating factor behind those changes was natural selection.

Natural selection was a theory all Darwin’s own. It stated that every animal and plant species on Earth was the product of the world around it. As explained in On the Origin of Species , natural selection is the process in which specific physical traits are preserved when they are advantageous genetic mutations. It was the same premise by which dogs had been bred for thousands of years in Britain: those dogs with the traits that breeders wanted to copy were bred together. Dogs with disadvantageous traits were kept out of the breeding pool.

Darwin’s research and theories posited that animals and humans probably had a common ancestor—and church-going Victorians were not impressed at all. God created humans in his own image, they explained, and no one was related to apes. On the other end of the social spectrum, scientists pored over their editions of Darwin’s book greedily, entranced by its implications in their own fields of research. The controversy and infighting between British subjects and the book’s wider European and international audiences were extreme.

The Victorians, however, did pride themselves very highly on maintaining order and diplomacy, and unlike the days of the Reformation, blaspheming against the Church was no longer means for execution in Great Britain. Indeed, despite the social ostracization Darwin suffered from many groups following the publishing of his book, he was honored by his country with a burial at Westminster Abbey. His body was put to rest near that of Isaac Newton.

Thanks to the perseverance of scientists like Darwin, medicine evolved in leaps and bounds over the course of the 19th century. Physicians used autopsies more regularly to learn about death, as well as about the parts of the body and how they interacted with each other. Given the rise of the indomitable industrial era, respiratory issues were one of the most common causes of complaint and death. Cholera was also very high on the list, especially because many doctors and scientists had yet to fully embrace germ theory. When it did catch on, Louis Pasteur used its principles to create a vaccine for anthrax and rabies. Pasteur’s work also led to new, safer methods for processing milk and dairy products, named pasteurization in his honor.