Otley and Dalton did pioneering work on the Lake District's weather and cloud formations, and inspired the research of Luke Howard, whose The Climate of London (1818-19) was read by Constable and led him to paint his marvellous studies of cloud formations.

It may seem churlish to criticise Holmes, who covers so much fertile ground, for not venturing further. But it is a weakness of his book that he has too little to say about the visual arts. Not only Constable but, still more, Turner, took a scientific attitude, in the light of the new knowledge, to the presentation of skies and landscape. Turner believed that he and his scientific contemporaries were involved in the same task: to explain the earth, by laws and equations and experiments, on the one hand, and by visual presentation on the other, to those who lived on it.

The artists were greatly helped, in bringing their work to the masses, by scientific-technical innovations, especially by the invention of lithography, the acquatint and the mezzotint. One artist who benefited enormously from these new processes was John Martin, who is not mentioned by Holmes, but whose illustrations to popular books were vital in bringing the antediluvian world of monsters to the public, and encouraging the study of fossils and geology. Martin's work is dealt with in a new book by Ralph O'Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856, which should be read as a supplement to Holmes's more general survey. Fossils and geology were so ubiquitous by the 1830s that Charles Dickens found it profitable to satirise them in The Pickwick Papers.

Indeed, though the artists and poets were fascinated by science, they were just as keen on profiting by the new technology, and made great efforts to learn about it. In 1819, Southey accompanied Thomas Telford, perhaps the greatest engineer Britain has ever produced, on a tour of the work he was doing to transform Scotland by building roads, canals, locks, bridges and ports. Southey may not have been among the greatest of poets but he was a superb writer of prose, and his book on his experiences with Telford should have found a place in Holmes's book, as a perfect illustration of the interplay of arts and science during that great age of imagination.