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 spring 1878. The lectures were reformatted into chapters and published as The Fairy-Land of Science in London in 1878. The edition digitized here was published in 1883.

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.