4 - Newtonian Studies and the History of Science 1835–1855

Summary

The history of Newton is in a great measure the history of science …

Baden Powell

… there is much more curiosity among you now than formerly, & greater diligence of research …

John Lee to Stephen Rigaud

In 1843 Baden Powell, who had succeeded Stephen Rigaud to the Savilian Professorship of Geometry, reviewed his predecessor's Historical Essay on the Principia and Correspondence of Scientific Men. He noted with pleasure that ‘the attention of several eminent persons has been more closely than heretofore directed to the details of our scientific history in general, and more especially to the eventful period of which Newton formed the brightest ornament’. In an essay published in the same year, De Morgan also commented on this phenomenon. After listing Brewster's Life of Newton, Rigaud's Works and Correspondence of Bradley (1832), Mark Napier's Memoirs of John Napier (1834), Baily's Account and Rigaud's Historical Essay, he noted that these ‘coming so close together, make a remarkable epoch in biographical writing’. The succeeding decade saw the brief existence of the Historical Society of Science (HSS), a number of important essays by De Morgan, and C. R. Weld's History of the Royal Society. Looking on to the 1850s we note works such as Joseph Edleston's Correspondence of Newton and Cotes, Brewster's Memoirs of Newton and Robert Grant's History of Astronomy. What the HSS and these works had in common was a focus on manuscript sources; it was their evidential detail and precision that commentators found noteworthy. However, this period is now known better for the publication of works of broader scope, based on secondary sources, including Powell's own History of Natural Philosophy (1834) and Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (1837).

These narrative or philosophical works have received great, and often exclusive, attention from those historians who have examined the nineteenth-century historiography of science. H. Floris Cohen believes that Whewell's History should have guided other historians of science but this was the ‘follow-up that failed to occur’.