The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the
men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the
eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science.
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped
to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping
through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of
new worlds. Other voyages of discovery--astronomical, chemical,
poetical, philosophical--swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling
evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of
William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public
conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas
experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers,
from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the
scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in
which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening
possibilities of science--an era whose consequences are with us still.