Product Description: This compelling new interdisciplinary study investigates the scientific and cultural roots of contemporary conceptions of the network, including computer information systems, the human nervous system, and communications technology...read more

Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century this division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better "man's estate", they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The quest for "origins", the nature of the relationship between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human were subjects that occupied both the writing of scientists and novelists. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce works of enduring power. It includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others. Also included are introductions and notes to guide the reader.

Product Description: A world-famous neurobiologist, Santiago Ramn y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for his scientific research in 1906. The previous year, he published these stories: five ingenious tales that take a microscopic look at the nature, allure, and danger of scientific curiosity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Membranes, Laura Otis examines how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the nineteenth century. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: How does the past live in us? Do we inherit our ancestors' memories as we do their physical characteristics? In the nineteenth century, mainstream science embraced a long-standing superstition: the belief that memory could be inherited...read more