Arabella Burton Buckley (1840-1929) was a writer and science educator who championed Darwinian evolution as opposed to the contemporary emphasis on competition and physical survival. This work, one of Buckley's earliest, includes a collection of ten scientific lectures delivered to an audience of children in 1878. The lectures were reformatted into chapters and published as The Fairy-Land of Science the following year (1879).

Buckley tended to avoid technical language in her writing and instead use narrative and metaphor to make her work accessible to a wide audience, especially young readers. She was a proponent of distancing science from the mechanistic and materialistic philosophies it was sometimes connected to. Instead, Buckley opted to promote science education in moralistic terms: learning as a means to not only become knowledgeable, but also morally good.