 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
Table of Contents CHAPTER 8 The chapter starts out with Charles’ visit to Ernestina’s house only to find her indisposed. Out of a sense of duty, he asks if he should summon the doctor but is dissuaded by Aunt Tranter. He decides to spend the day indulging in his hobby and goes to the seashore to look for fossils. The narrator then interrupts the narrative to give the reader scientific data on the geographical strata that is available in Lyme Regis. It is a haven for anybody who is scientifically inclined towards fossils. The narration returns back to Charles. He is highly overdressed by twentieth century standards. For instance, he wears hob-nailed boots to walk on a beach strewn with boulders. The narrator hastens to warn the reader from laughing at Charles’ attire as Victorians tended to be a little bit overzealous in their efforts. They were guided by their driven sense of duty. The narrator digresses again stating that modern man was not interested in the past, only the present. The narrator states that Charles had a sentimental attitude towards science than any deep rooted realistic interest in it. He claimed to be a Darwinist, but the truth was that he did not understand the great theorist. Paleontology eased his boredom. When Charles finds a fossil specimen, he remembers Ernestina and his duty to her. He decides to give the fossil to her and reluctantly turns back from his search. He realizes that he has lost a lot of time and decides to take a shortcut through the undercliff. Notes Chapter 8 is a discussion of Victorian attitudes towards scientific inquiry. The Victorian Age was heralded as the age of rationality. The Victorians were questioning religious dogmas and conventions of the past and were now encouraging factual scientific research. Science and its findings fascinated the Victorians, but they rarely understood it. They realized that very little efforts were channeled toward this purpose and so encouraged it, but the scientific method of inquiry was not popular at the time. The scientific method required the scientist to arrive at a hypotheses and then to prove or disprove it with factual data using empirical methods of research. The Victorians were ignorant of this method. They instead proposed theories to explain the existence of natural phenomenon that had no scientific backing. Like the majority of the Victorian public, Charles did not understand Darwin’s theory on the origin of species. He prefers to call himself a Darwinist as this makes him feel contemporary as well as driven by larger ideas about the world and its origins. Charles has very little direction and practically no expectations out of life. He prefers to play the role of an upper class gentleman and dilettante naturalist. Also, his sense of duty is very strong like most Victorians. The author digresses to inform the reader that his switch from paleontology to his duty to Ernestina was easily done. According to the narrator, Charles interest in science was more a way to deflect boredom and avoid making decisions rather than a deeply driven need to discover. Victorians believed that all knowledge was already discovered and that it just had to be catalogued. Therefore, Charles’ purpose in finding fossils is not to discover anything new but to focus on minutiae and avoid the larger picture of his life. Table of Contents | |
|
|
|||||||
