The Monumental Discovery That Changed How Humans See Themselves

In his beguiling poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens recalls a past era when religion was meant to explain everything, “when bishops’ books / Resolved the world.” But, as he reminds us, “we cannot go back to that.” There’s a kind of grace in the dynamic and even provisional nature of the world, he suggests. And in science, too, which seemed, particularly in the first half of the 19th century, to be on the brink of something wonderful—or terrifying, depending on your point of view. Two new books, Michael Taylor’s...