What we now loosely call science—meaning the physical sciences—was until the mid-nineteenth
century referred to under the rubric of "natural philosophy." The long-lived journal
of the Royal Society, begun under Charles II in 1660 and still the principal avenue
for publishing scientific discoveries in English during Mary Shelley's day, was called
Philosophical Transactions. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the heyday of British
chemistry, and it is this branch of natural philosophy that is most implicated in
Victor's education and obsessiveness.