It is closely related to our subject.
For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the idea of Progress.

That idea could not insinuate itself into the public mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of scientific discovery had been more or less diffused.

The achievements of physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general doctrine of Progress.
Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic circles.

But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion in the later years of Louis XIV.

Science was talked in the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy.