Here is an interesting 1884 article titled “Dream-Space,” by Richard Proctor, who is criticizing an article Professor Author Cayley wrote a few months earlier about little two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a sphere. Helmholtz had recently presented this anthropomorphic version of Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry theory, and Cayley expanded a little upon the idea in 1883 when he delivered a speech before the British Association. This is what led to Abbott’s “Flatland” fairy tale of 1884. Proctor (and others) thought the anthropomorphic idea was silly. Their attitude was that Riemann math was mathematics only, and it did not describe reality, and there could be no such things as little two-dimensional creatures living on a sphere and there could be no fourth dimension of three-dimensional “space.” The series of speculative articles that tried to anthropomorphitize Riemann geometry, and this Proctor critique (along with other critiques of that era), represent the beginning of the major paradigm change from “Classical Physics” to “Non-Classical Physics,” which picked up momentum early in the 20th Century.

Proctor’s 1884 article:
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-b...ABR0102-0160-6

The article begins at the bottom of the first column on page 228.