"Two scientific lives dominate the book: that of William Herschel, whose tireless dedication to the stars, assisted (and perhaps rivalled) by his comet-finding sister Caroline, changed forever the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and the meaning of the universe itself. Meanwhile Humphry Davy, a grammar-school boy from Cornwall, shocked the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments, then went on to invent the miners' lamp, and to establish British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe - but at the cost, perhaps, of his own heart." "Conceived as a 'relay race of scientific stories', The Age of Wonder proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats."--BOOK JACKET.