Although historians have long recognized the importance of long-range scientific expeditions in both the practice and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, it is less well understood how this form of scientific organization emerged and became established in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late seventeenth century new European scientific institutions tried to make use of globalized trade networks for their own ends, but to do so proved difficult. This paper offers a case history of one such expedition, the voyage sponsored by the French Académie royale des sciences to Gorée (in modern Senegal) and the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1681–3. The voyage of Varin, Deshayes and de Glos reveals how the process of travel itself caused problems for instruments and observers alike.

At the end of the last century Paul Tannery published an article on geometry in eleventh-century Europe, which he began with the following statement:

“This is not a chapter in the history of science; it is a study of ignorance, in a period immediately before the introduction into the West of Arab mathematics.”

The Animal Breeding Research Organisation in Edinburgh (ABRO, founded in 1945) was a direct ancestor of the Roslin Institute, celebrated for the cloning of Dolly the sheep. After a period of sustained growth as an institute of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), ABRO was to lose most of its funding in 1981. This decision has been absorbed into the narrative of the Thatcherite attack on science, but in this article I show that the choice to restructure ABRO pre-dated major government cuts to agricultural research, and stemmed from the ARC's wish to prioritize biotechnology in its portfolio. ABRO's management embraced this wish and campaigned against the cuts based on a promise of biotechnological innovation, shifting its focus from farm animal genetics to the production of recombinant pharmaceuticals in sheep milk. By tracing interaction between government policies, research council agendas and local strategies, I show how novel research programmes such as genetic modification could act as a lifeline for struggling institutions.

This paper examines the debate engendered in ethnological and anthropological circles by Darwin's Origin of Species and its effects. The debate was more about the nature of human diversity than about transmutation. By 1859 many polygenists thought monogenism had been clearly shown to be an antiquated and essentially religious concept. Yet the doctrine of natural selection gave rise to a ‘new monogenism’. Proponents of polygenism such as James Hunt claimed natural selection had finally excluded monogenism, but Thomas Huxley, the most prominent exponent of the new monogenism, claimed it amalgamated the ‘best’ of both polygenism and monogenism. What it did provide was an explanation for the irreversible inequality of races, while it maintained that all humans were of one species. This bolstered belief in the innate superiority of the Caucasians over other peoples. The effect was finally to sever British ethnology from its evangelical monogenist roots. More subtly and surprisingly, it provided support in Church circles for a move away from the ideal of the ‘Native Church’.

Traditional historiography of science has constructed secrecy in opposition to openness. In the first part of the paper, I will challenge this opposition. Openness and secrecy are often interlocked, impossible to take apart, and they might even reinforce each other. They should be understood as positive (instead of privative) categories that do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. In the second part of this paper, I call for a historicization of the concepts of ‘openness’ and ‘secrecy’. Focusing on the early modern period, I briefly introduce three kinds of secrecy that are difficult to analyse with a simple oppositional understanding of openness and secrecy. In particular, I focus on secrecy in relation to esoteric traditions, theatricality and allegory.

In April of 1849, a disspirited and vocationless Francis Galton consulted Donovan, a London phrenologist, for a reading of his aptitudes and character. After a disappointing university career and a prematurely concluded try at medical training, the 27-year-old Galton had been drifting unhappily for several years in the life of the idle rich. Donovan shrewdly assessed Galton's mind as ‘not distinguished by much spontaneous activity in relation to scholastic affairs’, but still with ‘much enduring power’ and other positive capacities brought fully to light ‘only when rough work has to be done’.

This paper examines the successful campaign in Britain to develop canine distemper vaccine between 1922 and 1933. The campaign mobilized disparate groups around the common cause of using modern science to save the nation's dogs from a deadly disease. Spearheaded by landed patricians associated with the country journal The Field, and funded by dog owners and associations, it relied on collaborations with veterinary professionals, government scientists, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the commercial pharmaceutical house the Burroughs Wellcome Company (BWC). The social organization of the campaign reveals a number of important, yet previously unexplored, features of interwar science and medicine in Britain. It depended on a patronage system that drew upon a large base of influential benefactors and public subscriptions. Coordinated by the Field Distemper Fund, this system was characterized by close relationships between landed elites and their social networks with senior science administrators and researchers. Relations between experts and non-experts were crucial, with high levels of public engagement in all aspects of research and vaccine development. At the same time, experimental and commercial research supported under the campaign saw dynamic interactions between animal and human medicine, which shaped the organization of the MRC's research programme and demonstrated the value of close collaboration between veterinary and medical science, with the dog as a shared object and resource. Finally, the campaign made possible the translation of ‘laboratory’ findings into field conditions and commercial products. Rather than a unidirectional process, translation involved negotiations over the very boundaries of the ‘laboratory’ and the ‘field’, and what constituted a viable vaccine. This paper suggests that historians reconsider standard historical accounts of the nature of patronage, the role of animals, and the interests of landed elites in interwar British science and medicine.

It is a matter of record that Henri Poincaré never responded publicly to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (RT). Since almost no private papers of Poincaré are available, his attitude toward Einstein's work and his silence on that score become somewhat of a mystery. It is almost certain that Poincaré knew of Einstein's work in RT. First, he was fluent in German, having learned it as a young man when the Germans occupied his home town of Nancy in 1870. Second, he often reported to the members of the Académie des Sciences on current work in electrodynamics in Germany. It is highly improbable that he would have missed the abstract of Einstein's first paper on RT or the subsequent articles by Einstein on the subject, especially those which were translated into French, since they were in areas directly related to his own interests in theoretical physics.

The modern corpuscular theory of radiation was born in 1905 when Einstein advanced his light quantum hypothesis; and the steps by which Einstein's hypothesis, after years of profound scepticism, was finally and fully vindicated by Arthur Compton's 1922 scattering experiments constitutes one of the most stimulating chapters in the history of recent physics. To begin to appreciate the complexity of this chapter, however, it is only necessary to emphasize an elementary but very significant point, namely, that while Einstein based his arguments for quanta largely on the behaviour of high-frequency black body radiation or ultra-violet light, Compton experimented with X-rays. A modern physicist accustomed to picturing ultra-violet light and X-radiation as simply two adjacent regions in the electromagnetic spectrum might regard this distinction as hair-splitting. But who in 1905 was sure that X-rays and γ-rays are far more closely related to ultra-violet light than to α-particles, for example ? This only became evident after years of painstaking research, so that moving without elaboration from Einstein's hypothesis to Compton's experiments automatically eliminates from consideration an important segment of history—a segment in which a major role was played by William Henry Bragg.

The history of science can be approached in several different ways. It may be studied, as in the classification once favoured in the long-established Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, by considering separately the history of individual sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.—Partington's monumental History of chemistry is a good example of the cross-section of history of science obtained by considering a single discipline. This approach is understandable when history of science is the work of retired specialists in a particular science. On the other hand, many of those who have approached the history of science from a training in general history have tended to favour a study of a particular period as an alternative to an orientation by subject. This is particularly valuable before the nineteenth century, when subject boundaries were not so tightly drawn as some of the old science historians tended to assume. A third possibility is area studies, usually the history of science within a particular country. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, as when historians claim that they are dealing with a general theme, such as science and religion or scientific institutions, but do so with special reference to their own country. French historians of ‘the Enlightenment’ often study French authors exclusively. Language as much as country is a limiting factor here.

This paper examines how communities of naturalists in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were formed and solidified around the shared practices of public meetings, the publication and reading of periodicals, and the making and printing of images. By focusing on communities of naturalists and the sites of their communication, this article undermines the distinction between amateur and professional scientific practice. Building on the notion of imagined communities, this paper also shows that in some cases the editors and illustrators utilized imagery to construct a specifically British naturalist community. Following three ‘amateur’ natural-history periodicals (Science Gossip, Midland Naturalist and the Journal of the Quekett Microscopical Club) the article demonstrates how the production and reproduction of natural history in the nineteenth century was contingent on community debate – and that this debate both was highly visual and moved across printed and geographical boundaries. This paper investigates images both for their purported success and for their ascribed value to natural history. Additionally, it considers the debates over their limitations and alleged failures of printing. Altogether, the article argues that investigating the communal practices of observation, writing, drawing and engraving allows for a better understanding of the shared practices of nineteenth-century natural history.

This essay argues that the material culture of the Renaissance garden played an important role in the development of Cartesian mathematical and mechanical philosophy. Garden machinery such as Salomon and Isaac de Caus's automata and grottoes provided a model from which Descartes drew his clockwork conceptions of nature and the human body. This machinery was also crucial in the Cartesian explanation of the rainbow. Not simply an exercise in intellectual curiosity, Descartes's geometrical description of the rainbow in Discourse Eight of the Météores was a direct response to the engineers of artificial rainbow fountains which populated European princely gardens for much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rejecting distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ rainbows, Descartes used these fountains and his own constructions of artificial water drops to discern the causes of the rainbow by refraction and reflection and, by analogy, to suppose this the explanation of rainbows in the sky. This knowledge was then utilized to propose an alternative to the rainbow fountain, using refracting liquids to cast images in the sky. Descartes presented a ‘science of miracles’ destined not to eradicate wonder but to make transparent the wonders of traditional garden engineers and replace them with wonders derived from knowledge of mathematical and mechanical philosophy. As such, the ‘science of miracles’ gave a new emphasis to the mind of the natural philosopher as the essential component in the creation of wonders, rather than the traditional skills and experience of the artisan or engineer.

This essay examines some aspects of the early history of the vitalism/mechanism controversies by examining the work of Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) in relation to that of Henry More (1614–87), Francis Glisson (1599–1677) and the more mechanistically inclined members of the Royal Society. I compliment and critically comment on John Henry's exploration of active principles in pre-Newtonian mechanist thought. The postulation of ‘active matter’ can be seen as an important support for the new experimental philosophy, but it has theological drawbacks, allowing for a self-sufficient nature relatively independent of God. Grew resists this view and, like Henry More, advocates the need for a vital principle to direct material nature towards its ends. I illustrate the connection Grew sees between teleology and vitalism and the paper closes with Pierre Bayle's reaction to Grew's attempt to support his religious commitments by appeal to vital principles.

So many Arts, hath the Divine Wisdom put together; only

for the hull and tackle, of a sensible and Thinking creature.

Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia

So much of the history of science has been written from the point of view of the scientist or the proto-scientist that it may be salutary for the modern reader occasionally to consider how science and its early practitioners were viewed from the outside. We must not be too surprised if a pioneering activity performed by controversial agents was misunderstood or misrepresented and if what emerges is, therefore, sometimes less of a portrait than a caricature. We are concerned here much less with what natural philosophers actually did than what they were thought to have done, or what they were thought to stand for. The image is sometimes more influential than the reality. Considering that the period to be studied is one of major political and social unrest and that the principal spokesman, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), had made his reputation mainly in the arena of parliamentary politics, we can anticipate rather more polemic than dispassionate argument. In the formation of public opinion a colourful exaggeration or even an occasional sneer are often more effective than the objective exposition of a case. The spectacles through which Burke looked at his world sometimes magnified and often distorted, but they produced a view of knowledge and society shared by many of his contemporaries and of considerable subsequent influence.

There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

In the extended introduction to this special issue on British nuclear culture, the guest editors outline the main historiographical and conceptual contours of British nuclear scholarship, and explore whether we can begin to define ‘British nuclear culture’ before introducing the contributors to this special issue, whose work we have organized into three broad areas. The first part is devoted to three articles that offer explicit and extended attempts to reconceptualize British nuclear culture, illuminating the complex links between nuclear science, the state and the individual citizen. The second part of this issue is devoted to three articles that concentrate on aspects of the history of nuclear science – focusing particularly on intellectuals, nuclear scientists and enthusiasts – alongside analysis of the popularization of nuclear science as well as the relationship between the state and nuclear science and its practitioners. In the third part, four articles examine the diverse ways in which ‘official’ narratives of the atomic age can be questioned, disrupted or enhanced by analysing the significance of journalistic, anti-nuclear and fictional narratives to the development of nuclear culture in Britain.

Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), a series of lively dialogues on optics, was a landmark in the popularization of Newtonian philosophy. In this essay I shall explore Algarotti's sociocultural world, his aims and ambitions, and the meaning he attached to his own work. In particular I shall focus on Algarotti's self-promotional strategies, his deployment of gendered images and his use of popular philosophy within the broader cultural and experimental campaign for the success of Newtonianism. Finally, I shall suggest a radical reading of the dialogues, reconstructing the process that brought them to their religious condemnation. What did Newtonianism mean to Algarotti? In opposition to mainstream apologetic interpretations, he seems to have framed the new experimental methodology in a sensationalistic epistemology derived mainly from Locke, pointing at a series of subversive religious and political implications. Due to the intervention of religious authorities Algarotti's radical Newtonianism became gradually less visible in subsequent editions and translations. It is only through the study of the first – clandestine – edition of the dialogues that one can begin reconstructing the meaning of Algarotti's experiments (real and fictional) and his cultural battle for a regenerated Europe.

In 1877 the first issue of the Revue des questions scientifiques, published by the Scientific Society of Brussels, appeared in France and Belgium. The new journal was greeted with disdain and hostility by Emile Littrè and George Wyrouboff, the disciples of Auguste Comte and editors of La philosophie positive. The Scientific Society of Brussels was a Catholic organization, and the positivists' opinion was that ‘If science is spoken of in this assembly, it is in order to organize a veritable crusade against it’. But the highly prejudiced assessment by Littré and Wyrouboff completely misread the goals of the society. At the time, the Catholic Church was en pleine crise both in France and Belgium. Church attendance had declined dramatically in recent years, as had the number of young people entering religious orders. Many Catholic laymen and church officials were becoming convinced that some rapprochment with the modern world and modern science was essential. It was to this difficult task that the Catholics of the Brussels Scientific Society addressed themselves with determination.