The paper reports new findings about Galileo's experiments with pendulums and discusses their significance in the context of Galileo's writings. The methodology is based on a phenomenological approach to Galileo's experiments, supported by computer modelling and close analysis of extant textual evidence. This methodology has allowed the author to shed light on some puzzles that Galileo's experiments have created for scholars.

Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon was produced, published and enlarged through the collaboration of the author with scholars including Robert Hooke and financial support from members of the East India Company. The Relation should be seen in the context of a number of texts collected, translated or commissioned by the East India Company in cooperation with the Royal Society during the late seventeenth century that informed and shaped both European expansion and natural philosophy. As well as circulating between European intellectual centres, often reorientated in the process of translation, these texts served as practical guides across settlements and trading posts abroad. Comparing written accounts with experience led to annotations and borrowings that served as the basis for further writings. Company records and Knox's own unpublished works reveal how the Relation was used as the basis for bio-prospecting for naturally occurring drugs and food sources and in efforts at agricultural transplantation spanning the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Through the reports of seamen like Knox, such experiments contributed to contemporary theories concerning the effects of latitude on plant life.

This paper focuses on the response of the Royal Society to the increasing contact with parts of the globe beyond Europe. Such contact was in accord with the programme of Baconian natural history that the early Royal Society espoused, but it also raised basic questions about the extent and nature of the pursuit of natural history. In particular, the paper is concerned with the attention paid to one particular branch of natural history, the study of other peoples and their customs. Such scrutiny of other peoples in distant lands raised basic questions about what methods natural history should employ and the extent to which it could serve as a foundation for more general and theoretical claims. By taking a wide sweep from the beginnings of the Royal Society until the end of the eighteenth century it is hoped light will be shed on the changing understanding of natural history over this period.

In the 1940s the Marxist mathematician and historian of science Samuel Lilley (1914–87) made a substantial contribution to British history of science both intellectually and institutionally. His role, however, has largely gone unnoticed. Lilley is otherwise portrayed either as exemplifying the immaturity of Marxism, most famously by Rupert Hall in ‘Merton revisited’ (1963), or as a tragic figure marginalized during the Cold War because of his communist commitment. But both themes of exclusion and victimization keep Lilley's legacy hidden. By revisiting Lilley and his long-standing commitment to developing our discipline, this essay challenges the notion of radical discontinuity with respect to Lilley's legacy and argues for a more sustained contribution by Marxist historiography of science. This, in turn, requires a more appreciative understanding of the moderate Marxist model developed by Lilley in his popular, political and professional publications on the history of the social relations of science.