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 Company records and Knox's own unpublished works reveal how the Relation was used as the basis for bio-prospecting for naturally occurring drugs and food sources and in efforts at agricultural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.

In recent years a number of scholars have argued that Faraday's theories of matter and force were founded on concepts which were derived from Boscovich's Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis (1758). The notion that Faraday's ideas display Boscovichean tendencies is not a new one: it was proposed by several of Faraday's immediate successors and has been noted by more recent commentators. Statements of this kind are not implausible as assertions of a general correspondence between Faraday's views on matter, as expressed in the “Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter” of 1844, and Boscovich's theory of point atomism, but Professor L. Pearce Williams has made much stronger claims for the dependence of Faraday's ideas on Boscovich's theory of matter. Williams' interpretation has been questioned by recent scholarship, and in this paper I wish to advance an alternative interpretation of Faraday's ideas on electricity and the nature of matter.

In this paper we examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought. In spite of a certain number of theoretical problems, Foucault's enterprise opens up to the historian of science a vast terrain for exploration. But this is the place neither for a general exegesis nor for a general criticism of his position; our aim here is the more modest one of taking certain points from Foucault's study, The order of things, and seeing how far they can be extended into an area not explicitly considered in that work.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anatomy depended upon a variety of visual displays. Drawings in books, particularly expensive, beautiful and elaborately illustrated books that have been the objects of historians' fascination, were understood to function alongside chalk drawings done in classrooms, casual and formalized experience with animal and human corpses, text describing or contextualizing the images, and preserved specimens. This article argues that British anatomists of the late Enlightenment discovered and taught an intelligible, orderly Nature through comprehensive systems of display. These systems trained vision, and, taken as a whole, they can be used to understand a visual culture of science. Displays helped anatomists, artists and natural philosophers learn to see both the tiniest and the rarest of parts and an overall general plan of anatomy and relationship of parts. Each type of display was materially different from the others and each served to perfect human vision for a group of natural philosophers who valued sensory experience – primarily that of vision, but also that of touch – as the basis of learning. Together, these displays allowed the anatomist to see, in all of its dimensions, human nature, frozen in the ordered and unstressed state of fresh death, a comprehensible guide to life and its functions. A pedagogical context of use defined and bound such displays together as complementary parts of a unified project. A system of display stood in for Nature and at the same time represented her ordering by anatomists.

Over the last forty years several historians have drawn attention to aspects of the activities of lecturers on natural philosophy in Britain in the eighteenth century. Hans and others looked at the part these lecturers played in the development of education, particularly adult education. Musson and Robinson considered the possible connection between the work of the lecturers and the growth of industry, and Inkster and others have explored the relationship between lecturers and the institutions set up to support science, especially around 1800.4 More recently, Schaffer has pointed to the parallels between the performances of the lecturers on natural philosophy and other contemporary cultural activities. As a consequence of these studies we know much more about the work of the lecturers, its significance, and, to a lesser extent, their relationship to their audience.

Until fairly recently a common way of doing history of science was to pick up an important strand of contemporary scientific thought and to trace its origin back to the philosophical tangle of the scientific revolution. This approach conveniently by-passed the breakdowns of once useful and pervasive theories, and neglected the long intellectual journeys along devious routes. History of science read like a success story; the pioneers who failed were neither dismissed nor excused; they were simply ignored. The historian knew what he was hunting for and he was careful to limit his search to areas where his quarry was sure to be found. This method, which has been dubbed the precursor-view, stands in contrast—albeit, not in opposition—to the contextual method, which aims at a better understanding of the actual thought-processes of the early scientists. On this second view, history of science must not only account for present theories in the light of past developments, it must also assess old theories in terms of the scientist's conceptual framework, and judge them against the background of the world picture of his age. This may lead the historian down the blind alleys of the past, chasing spurious attempts at explaining the nature of physical reality, but it can clear the ground for a less anachronistic interpretation of the emergence of modern science and the actual process of discovery. History of science acts as a winnowing fork, but we cannot suppose that the discoverer himself always separated the wheat from the chaff, and we must be ever wary of equating the dream with the task.

Two questions will receive special attention in this account, namely the political location of eugenics and the role of genetic science in its development. I will show that moderate eugenic policies had broad political support. For instance, the Scandinavian sterilization laws which were introduced in the 1930s were supported by the Social Democratic Parties, who were partly in position of government. I will argue that the effect of genetic research was to make eugenics more moderate, mainly because the fears and hopes were shown to be exaggerated. Degeneration was much slower than feared at first, if it took place at all, and the expectation of rapid and large effects of eugenic policies on the gene pool likewise proved to be quite unrealistic.

Much has been written about Robert Hooke's so-called ‘Discourse of Earthquakes’, the series of lectures he delivered before the Royal Society of London over the years 1667–1700. The chief points of the lectures are thus well known: fossils (the word is used here in its modern meaning) are the remains of once-living organisms, and their burial in rather odd places within the earth's crust can be explained by the dislocations of land and sea resulting from earthquakes.

By the early twentieth century there was a growing need within palaeoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology to find a way of dating fossils and artefacts in order to know the age of specific specimens, but more importantly to establish an absolute chronology for human prehistory. The radiocarbon and potassium–argon dating methods revolutionized palaeoanthropology during the last half of the twentieth century. However, prior to the invention of these methods there were attempts to devise chemical means of dating fossil bone. Collaborations between Emile Rivière and Adolphe Carnot in the 1890s led to the development of the fluorine dating method, but it was not until the 1940s that this method was improved and widely implemented by Kenneth Oakley to resolve a number of problems in palaeoanthropology, including the Piltdown Man controversy. The invention of the fluorine dating method marked a significant advance in the quest for absolute dating in palaeoanthropology, but it also highlights interesting problems and issues relating to the ability of palaeoanthropologists and chemists to bring together different skills and bodies of knowledge in order successfully to develop and apply the fluorine dating method.

Sir Kenelm Digby's A Late Discourse … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (1658) is usually read in the context of seventeenth-century explanations of the weapon-salve. The salve supposedly worked by being applied to the weapon that made a wound rather than to the wound itself. But Digby's essay was as much an effort to claim priority for a powdered version of the sympathetic cure as an explanation of how the cure worked. A close examination of Digby's claims in the Late Discourse in the context of his own earlier work and of works by his contemporaries shows his priority claim to have been false. It was recognized as such by his most knowledgeable associates. The story of Digby's fabrications offers a case study of the generic and rhetorical terms in which seventeenth-century English thinkers made and challenged natural-philosophical claims.

On 6 September 1836, George White wrote from Hatton Garden to T. B. Hall in Liverpool:

I see by an advertisement that [there is] a proposition to form a Society to be called the Botanical Society of London—Its objects are the advancement of Botanical Science in general but more especially systematic and descriptive Botany—the formation of a Library, Museum & Herbarium—A meeting will be held at the Crown & Anchor, Strand, tomorrow evening & it is my intention to attend it—It has been proposed that Ladies should be admitted!!!

If the writer of those words lived up to his declared intention and did attend that or any other of the long string of inaugural meetings the Society held during the last quarter of that year, he would have been startled, perhaps even appalled to find how seriously that last-mentioned proposal had been taken. For on 3 November he would have found in the room at the Crown and Anchor Tavern (according to one report) ‘a crowded assembly of both ladies and gentlemen’. He would also have heard the founder of the Society, the nineteen-year-old Daniel Cooper, deliver a paper on the effects of light on plants, which (according to the same report) ‘excited great interest, more particularly with the ladies’. A fortnight later the meeting was again ‘numerously attended’ and again it attracted a number of the supposedly unlearned sex, some of whom by then were ‘members of the society’ unambiguously.

On occasion Charles Darwin can seem our scientific contemporary, for the subjects he engaged remain engaging today, but in his role as author he belongs to the past. It is not customary today for scientists to write book after book, as Darwin did, or for these books to serve as the primary vehicle of scientific communication. For Darwin, however, the book was central. He wrote at least eighteen, depending on what one counts; in his Autobiography he entitled the section describing his most important work ‘An account how several books arose’; and in his personal Journal, begun in August 1838 after he had come to a mature sense of himself, he organized entries around his books. A characteristic entry is that for 1846: ‘Oct. 1st. Finished last proof of my Geolog. Observ. on S. America; This volume, including Paper in Geolog. Journal on the Falkland Islands took me 18 & 1/2 months:–’. Further, almost always he had a book under way: when one was complete, the next was begun. He called them the milestones to his life.

In 1948, in response to the perceived threat of atomic war, the British government embarked on a new civil defence programme. By the mid-1950s, secret government reports were already warning that this programme would be completely inadequate to deal with a nuclear attack. The government responded to these warnings by cutting civil defence spending, while issuing apparently absurd pamphlets advising the public on how they could protect themselves from nuclear attack. Historians have thus far sought to explain this response with reference to high-level decisions taken by policymakers, and have tended to dismiss civil defence advice as mere propaganda. This paper challenges this interpretation by considering the little-known role of the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch, a group of experts whose scientific and technical knowledge informed both civil defence policy and advice to the public. It explores both their advisory and research work, demonstrating their role in shaping civil defence policy and showing that detailed research programmes lay behind the much-mocked government civil defence pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s.

In England, institutionalized locations for science in academe and industry sprang up at approximately the same time, that is to say, during the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War. By the latter date science was well established within most academic institutions and, more rudimentarily, in many industrial firms. Standardized forms of practice were to be found in both sectors, and there existed mechanisms for the transfer of personnel, knowledge and finance between the two. Both sites were of course surrounded and sustained by a network of other institutions and practices: scientific and technical societies and journals, patent and company law, government agencies and so on. Nevertheless, during the period just identified these two developed as the key occupational sites (outside schoolteaching) for men trained in science.

This paper takes up the concept of ‘crisis’ at both historical and historiographical levels. It proceeds through two examples of periods that have been described by historians of physics using a language of crisis. The first examines an incipient German theoretical-physics community around 1900 and the debates that concerned the so-called ‘failure’ of the mechanical world view. It is argued, largely on the basis of what is now an extensive body of secondary literature, that there is little evidence for a widespread crisis in this period. Abandoning the term as both description and explanation, one comes to the far more intriguing suggestion that the conflict over foundations was not evidence of a divisive dissonance but rather of collective construction. What has been termed crisis was, in fact, the practice of theoretical physics in the fin de siècle. The second example is the period either side of the advent of quantum mechanics around 1925. Different subgroups within the theoretical-physics community viewed the state of the field in dramatically different ways. Those, such as members of the Sommerfeld school in Munich, who saw the task of the physicist as lying in the solution of particular problems, neither saw a crisis nor acknowledged its resolution. On the other hand those, such as several researchers associated with Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, who focused on the creation and adaptation of new principles, openly advocated a crisis even before decisive anomalies arose. They then sought to conceptualize the development of quantum mechanics in terms of crises and the revolutions that followed. Thomas Kuhn's language of crisis, revolution and anomaly, it is concluded, arises from his focus on only one set of theoretical physicists. A closer look at intra-communal differences opens a new vista onto what he termed ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science.

The frequent distinction made between scientific and purely amateur collections misrepresents the specificity of the field of eighteenth-century natural history. This paper argues that the extent and the boundaries of a scientific field can be determined only within the framework of concrete historical constellations of institutions, protagonists, practices and objects. By tracing the circulation of shells in eighteenth-century France, Paris in particular, between about 1735 and 1780, it becomes evident which individuals or groups actually came into contact with these shells; in what practices of collecting, describing and classification they were involved; and in what spaces they were displayed. Thus the contours of a constellation emerge which differ considerably from those drawn hitherto.

This article engages with debates about the status and geographies of colonial science by arguing for the significance of meteorological knowledge making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mauritius. The article focuses on how tropical storms were imagined, theorized and anticipated by an isolated – but by no means peripheral – cast of meteorologists who positioned Mauritius as an important centre of calculation in an expanding infrastructure of maritime meteorology. Charles Meldrum in particular earned renown in the mid-nineteenth century for theoretical insights into cyclone behaviour and for achieving an unprecedented spatial reach in synoptic meteorology. But as the influx of weather data dried up towards the end of the century, attention turned to developing practices of ‘single-station forecasting’, by which cyclones might be foreseen and predicted not through extended observational networks, but by careful study of the behaviour of one set of instruments in one place. These practices created new moral economies of risk and responsibility, as well as a ‘poetry’, as one meteorologist described it, in the instrumental, sensory and imaginative engagement with a violent atmospheric environment. Colonial Indian Ocean ‘cyclonology’ offers an opportunity to reflect on how the physical, economic and cultural geographies of an island colony combined to produce spaces of weather observation defined by both connection and disconnection, the latter to be overcome not only by infrastructure, but also by the imagination.

On 22 December 1827, a letter was received by the council of the newly founded London University from a ‘Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge ċ desirous of becoming a Candidate for the Mathematical Chair in the University of London’. The letter proceeded ‘to refer the Council to the Tutors of Trinity College, and to his degree in the Tripos of 1827, for testimonials of qualifications &c’. Two months later, the applicant received a brief note ‘informing you that the Council yesterday elected you professor of Mathematics after the most distinguished competition that there has been for any chair’. The recipient was (with the exception of the years 1831–36) to remain in this position for over a third of a century, during which time he would establish and maintain not only the reputation of the fledgling university, but also his own as a highly respected mathematician and logician. His name was Augustus De Morgan.

Although there are numerous and significant differences between the theories of scientific growth and change proposed by Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan, they all hold that specific scientific theories should be viewed as constitutive of more comprehensive theories. Kuhn calls those more general theories ‘paradigms’, Lakatos labels them ‘research programmes’ and Laudan refers to them as ‘research traditions’. They all argue that scientists are much more willing to give up the specific theory within a given research programme rather than the programme itself, and that individual theories should be viewed as attempts to increase the overall explanatory power of the more general theories, since the ultimate concern of the scientist is with the success of the general rather than the specific theory. When a basic theory or research programme is confronted with severe criticism, proponents attempt to protect the hard core or central elements of their programme through the invention of auxiliary hypotheses. Good auxiliary hypotheses adequately answer the objections for which they are designed, and suggest new avenues of research. In 1928, Arthur Holmes provided proponents of continental drift theory with an auxiliary hypothesis which afforded them a badly needed account of the forces responsible for continental drift. Although Holmes' proposal was not ultimately correct, it was the first plausible alternative offered by an exponent of the continental drift research programme.