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|Historical Context=In the 17th century, the “method of hypothesis” (i.e. the hypothetico-deductive method) was popular, but by the 1720s and 1730s it had lost its influence and was replaced by slow, careful inductive methods influenced by the success of Newton’s Principia.[[CiteRef::Laudan(1981a)|pp. 9-12]] This view was still largely in effect when John Herschel was born in 1792 into a preeminent English scientific family, his father William being a prominent astronomer who is credited with discovering Uranus. He became one of the most respected scientists of his time, and in 1830s England, “one answer to the question of how to be scientific might be, ‘Be as much like Herschel as possible.’”[[CiteRef::Cannon(1961a)|p. 219]] He excelled in pure mathematics, optics (he was a pioneer in the technology leading to photography), astronomy and botany (among others). The inductive method of the day remains apparent in influencing Herschel’s work, but he deviates from it in notable ways, resulting in him being part of the movement which revived the method of hypothesis. This revival was influenced partly by scientific theories developed in the mid-late 18th century like the wave theory of light, the theory of phlogiston, and Franklin’s fluid theory of electricity, each of which hypothesized unobservables to explain observable phenomena. In other words, these hypotheses decidedly did not come from the aforementioned slow and cautious inductive methods. Given the apparent success of at least the wave theory of light, they had to be given some consideration as good, accurate scientific theories. And this is where the method of hypothesis, aided by Herschel and his contemporaries/immediate predecessors (such as Whewell, LeSage, Senebier, and Stewart), came back to become the dominant scientific method.