In a century that saw great leaps in scientific knowledge, huge changes in the ease of communication and the speed of travel, and new theories that challenged fundamental beliefs, the relationship between science and the wider community was exciting and multi-faceted. The Australian scientific enterprise developed over the century from a tentative, exclusive beginning to a solid establishment that sought to play a greater role in the lives of the colonists.
Developments of the scientific enterprise can provide explanations for many of the statements and programmes of the colonial scientific enterprise. It cannot explain them all. The presidents expressed a concern to involve the public in science in complex terms that cannot be explained solely by the establishment's need for prestige or financial support. Their insistence on higher ideals and higher goals does not necessarily imply empty rhetoric. Henry Deane, Sir R.G.C. Hamilton, Archibald Liversidge, Ferdinand von Mueller, J.H. Maiden, R.L.J. Ellery, and the others held beliefs in common with the rest of the middle-class community. It appears that they believed in their personal obligations to the wider colonial community. They felt obliged to step in and advance institutions and modes of living to bring not just material progress but to develop the colonists' minds and morals.
Many chose science to be an instrument of reform: to make cities healthier, to lift the minds of the colonists above materialism, to inculcate a higher moral tone, and to help people to cope with the crisis of confidence brought about by the depression.
New workers for science would ensure that scientific knowledge would advance. Then, with a greater knowledge of the dynamics of the natural world, people could find ways to master it and achieve greater prosperity. Diseases could be more readily controlled. Expanding networks of transport and communication could bring people closer together.
More was needed than material advance alone. Many colonists encouraged individuals to pursue science because it was a pursuit that fostered diligence and intellectual activity, and allowed the inculcation of the fundamental qualities of the virtuous, harmonious natural world.
Much has been uncovered in this study that invites further research. Materials relating to Australian science are plentiful; scientists have always been ardent record-keepers. The many institutional and personal records, and works of literature in the public sphere, that relate to science are indicative of the prominence of science in the lives of nineteenth-century people. These records are of use not only to the historian of science. There is much that could be useful to the historian of Australian society, of gender or class relations, and of beliefs and ideas.
This thesis has surveyed a wide terrain of beliefs, duties and convictions, many of which are foreign to us in the late twentieth century. Instead of assuming ulterior motives, the aims which the scientists expressed have been seen as aims that were natural for people of their social and conceptual background.
Some central motives of members of the colonial middle-class have been investigated, along with the problems they identified in the colonies in the late nineteenth century, and the means they chose to solve them. In doing so, we have come closer to understanding why the scientists of the Royal Societies of south-eastern Australia and the AAAS made efforts to involve the wider community in science. Like other colonists, the scientists believed in the need for material, mental and moral progress and saw the pursuit of science as a way to achieve it. That progress was their goal. Public involvement was the means.