Walton's polar exploration, with its concern for the secret of magnetism (I:L1:2),
and Victor's experiments with electricity (I:1:23) as vital fluid intersect with one
of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Although Erasmus Darwin's scientific take on the linkage—that it is somehow
to be explained by basic chemistry rather than the mechanics of physics—is wrong,
what impels it is not. Indeed, though it is pedestrian in manner, the lengthy twelfth
note to The Temple of Nature is nothing short of visionary. There Darwin first extensively
expounds the dynamics of electricity, then turns to the similar processes of magnetism,
bifurcated figuratively between arctic and antarctic poles, and in the end links the
two with a rudimentary conception of atomic physics (only to be expounded by John
Dalton in the decade after Darwin's death), and with the third component of the Grand
Unified Field Theory, gravitation. That Mary Shelley is aware of this conjunction
can be deduced from Walton's hope that his discoveries will help astronomers "regulate
a thousand celestial observations."