Whereas the academic discipline of the history of science has made enormous strides in half a century, ironically, recognition from without has often been disappointing. Private success has not been matched by public status. The work of the Science Museum in London as one of the few widely accessible windows into the discipline is therefore worth remarking upon here, and more detailed investigations are even now under way. The foundation of the British Society for the History of Science at the Museum, in 1947, symbolized a role that the Museum had already played for decades and plays to this day: the pre-eminent public space of the history of science. This distinctive role has of course been shared by other object-based museums attracting large numbers of visitors in places such as Manchester, Greenwich and Edinburgh as well as in Munich and Washington.

Although the process of Westernisation in Russia began long before the eighteenth century, its impact was not really felt until the time of Peter the Great.

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.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is often considered the father of the discipline of anthropology. Despite such eminence, his biography has never been written and the connections between his life and his work have been largely obscured or ignored. This article presents Tylor's main theories in the field of anthropology, especially as presented in his four published books, the most famous of which is Primitive Culture, and in the manuscript sources for his last, unpublished, one on ‘The natural history of religion’. One of Tylor's major areas of interest was the use of anthropological evidence to discover how religion arose. This preoccupation resulted in his influential account of ‘animism’. Drawing upon biographical information not known by previous scholars, Tylor's Quaker formation, later religious scepticism and personal life are connected to his intellectual work. Assumptions such as his evolutionary view of human culture and intellectualist approach to ‘savage’ customs, his use of the comparative method, and distinctive notions of his such as ‘survivals’ are first explained, and then the discussion is taken a step further in order to demonstrate how they were deployed to influence contemporary religious beliefs and practices. Tylor argued that the discipline of anthropology was a ‘reformer's science’. Working within the warfare model of the relationship between faith and science, I reveal the extent to which this meant for him using the tools of this new field of inquiry to bring about changes in the religious convictions of his contemporaries.

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’.

In his famous biography, Ernest Jones turns aside from his central theme at one point to relate a curious episode involving psychoanalysis and Hollywood, in the persons of Freud and the well-known film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Like many others in the film industry, Goldwyn was fascinated with the challenge of exploiting the association between psychoanalysis and sex on screen, but although he approached ‘the greatest love specialist in the world’ with an offer of $100 000 for his co-operation in making a movie, Freud declined and even refused to see him. To some degree, Freud's antagonism sprang from his distaste for America and its values, which he contemptuously dismissed as a blend of crude behaviourism, materialism and consumerism, epitomized in the figure of Goldwyn, whose reputation for vulgarity had preceded his arrival in Europe. But for the most part, he remained sceptical that the theories of psychoanalysis could ever be properly expressed on the silver screen, even when the attempt was made by two close acquaintances, Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham.

This paper examines the movement of the materials, ideas and practices that went into the construction of natural-historical observations in Paris and the French provinces – in particular, observations of insects. The paired notions of circulation and locality expose the complex dynamic at play in the production of knowledge about these mundane creatures. I show how the movement of things and people problematizes the notion of a single ‘centre of calculation’, even where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts. Réaumur was indeed managing the flow of observations, letters and specimens from his privileged vantage point in Paris, but he was not the only one doing the processing, and the objects and knowledge flowed in all directions. The paper uses correspondence among eighteenth-century naturalists of various sorts to get at the dynamics of circulation, tracing the movements of insects, bits of text or narrative, drawings, letters, questions, apparatus, books and people. My title refers to the activities of naturalists, who had to follow insects around in order to observe them, and to my own activity in following the insects in their movement through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings and texts. My research depends on the accumulation of details about experimental and observational practice, culled from the masses of letters that moved continually around Europe, much as the science of insects depended on the accumulation of details about insects – their physiology, habits, metamorphosis and place in the human economy and the economy of nature.

In 1823 the astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel gave notice of an observational error which is now known as the personal equation. Bessel, however, never used this phrase to characterize the finding that when noting the time of a certain event observers show a considerable ‘involuntary constant difference’. From this starting point the paper develops two arguments. First, these involuntary differences subverted the concept of the ‘observing observer’. What had previously been defined as a reference point of trust and precision turned into a source of an error that resisted any wilful intervention. Second, and contrary to later suggestions, Bessel's findings did not initially lead to discussions and measures of permanent control. In everyday astronomical work the influence of such differences could be avoided by comparatively simple means. Taking this into account offers a new perspective both on the history of the personal equation and on the significance of Bessel's findings. Whereas the former has to be read as the history of a rather particular reaction to the phenomenon of constant differences, the latter is connected with a rather fundamental transition in the epistemology of the observer.

In a 1976 paper, Robert DeKosky wrote ‘William Crookes is a puzzle to historians of latenineteenth century science. Despite his achievements we are forced to ask why he did not accomplish more.’ It is an interesting question; equally interesting is the question that prompts this paper – how did he accomplish so much?

Why some scientists become prolific and successful is a question with both historical and ahistorical dimensions. Among the former are a number of cultural aspects rarely studied by historians. They include the nature of childhood experience, family attitudes, mentoring, and the existence of intellectual and practical support networks in adulthood. Ail are important, but how they contribute to individual success varies with time and place.

Whereas there has been considerable debate about the social context of Darwin's theory of natural selection, much less focus has been placed upon Alfred Russel Wallace. This article looks at Wallace's socialism and, in particular, the influence upon his thought of the early nineteenth-century socialist Robert Owen. It argues that a case can be made for seeing Wallace's thought about nature and natural selection in the years up to 1858 in the context of Owenism. Three aspects of his thought are singled out for examination. These are, first, Wallace's views on the role of instinct in animal and human behaviour; second, the idea of colonization in human society and in nature; and third, a re-examination of the role of Malthus in Wallace's thought, emphasizing the influence upon him of the early nineteenth-century socialist critique of Malthusianism.

This paper looks at phrenological charts as mediators of (pseudo-)scientific knowledge to individual clients who used them as a means of self-assessment. Phrenologists propagated the idea that the human mind could be categorized into different mental faculties, with each particular faculty represented in a different area of the brain and by bumps on the head. In the US and the UK popular phrenologists examined individual clients for a fee. Drawing on a collection of phrenological charts completed for individual clients, this paper shows how charts aspired to convey new ideals of selfhood by using the authority of science in tailor-made certificates, and by teaching clients some of the basic practices of that science. Hitherto historians studying phrenology have focused mainly on the attraction of the content of phrenological knowledge for the wider public, but in this paper I show how the charts enabled clients to participate actively in creating knowledge of their own bodies and selves.

In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1809–82) briefly drew an analogy between languages and species, suggesting that the genealogical relationships between languages provide a model for discussing the descent and modification of species. Further, he suggested that just as languages often contain some vestige of earlier speech, for example silent, unpronounced letters, so the rudimentary organs of animals can provide clues about genealogy and descent.

The foundation of the Royal Society marks an important step in the institutionalization of seventeenth-century British natural philosophy. The society's existence and activities provided a focus for the exchange of opinions, while its meetings and publications became forums for scientific debate. Some writers, however, have claimed much more than this for the society and have seen its establishment as marking a real watershed between, on the one hand, intellectually ‘conservative elements’ and, on the other, a set of ‘definite philosophical principles … inspiring … progressive minds’. Others have gone still further and argued not only that the society's activities ‘enormously’ accelerated ‘the development of natural sciences’, but that these activities were the result of the ‘working out of a conscious, deliberately-conceived ideal’. But views which see a single, logically consistent conception of the nature of the scientific enterprise informing the work and outlook of the Royal Society and its members involve a serious oversimplification of the complexity of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century. Despite some important work published in recent years, we are still far from achieving a satisfactory understanding of the complicated web of traditions, sources, and intellectual systems that provided both an inspirational dynamic for the work of natural philosophers such as those in the Royal Society and patterns of expression through which their preoccupations could be articulated. Thus the many studies which have been devoted to establishing connexions between the scientific movement and patterns of religious or political belief have been flawed from the start by unreal assumptions about the degree of intellectual coherence presented by the natural philosophy of the time. And until we can present a more three-dimensional picture of what the 'scientific movement’ was in fact all about, and until wider agreement has been reached as to satisfactory definitions of various types of socio-theological attitude and behaviour, such studies are no more than attempts to tie together two unknowns by means of a rope of sand.

This essay concerns an aspect of the speculative contributions of J. J. Thomson to a field of physics somewhat removed from that upon which his popular fame and scientific eminence were alike founded. He published a number of statements in the period 1903–1910 advocating a discontinuous structure of the electromagnetic field. His unorthodox conception of the field was based upon the presumed discreteness of Faraday's physical lines of electric force. While his ideas led to significant experimental work, they were not brought together in the form of a completed theory. It was at this same time that the quantum theory was independently evolving notions of a structure of the field, and Thomson's efforts at developing a theory of light were diverted into a protracted criticism of the hypothesis of quanta. In 1924–1936 he returned to the subject of the structure of light, but these latter speculations no longer had much relevance to contemporary physical thought.

In December of 1675, in a desperate race with Christiaan Huygens over a patent for a spring-regulated watch, Robert Hooke, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) characterized the clock maker Thomas Tompion as a ‘Slug’, a ‘Clownish Churlish Dog’ and a ‘Rascall’, because Tompion was making a watch of Hooke's design too slowly for the latter's taste. It was Hooke's watch, not Tompion's; Hooke was the patron and Tompion the client. Fifty years later Tompion's apprentice, George Graham, made watches and clocks and quadrants for other Fellows of the Royal Society, yet these instruments were known as Graham's clocks and Graham's quadrants. Language such as Hooke had used towards Tompion was inconceivable towards Graham; he was a member of the Royal Society's governing body, the Council, and had published several significant papers in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in which his testimony on and experiments in astronomy, magnetism, horology and metrology were unquestioned. Yet in the early decades of the eighteenth century one could still go to his shop in London's Strand and buy a watch or a clock from him. Like Tompion, George Graham, FRS was a shopkeeper. Nor was he alone in the eighteenth century, at that supposed bastion of gentlemen, the Royal Society. Nearly two-thirds of the membership had to work for a living in one way or another, some rather grandly as high government officials, senior army officers, clerics with ample livings and physicians and lawyers with large and successful London practices ; others more modestly as sailors, surgeons, apothecaries, schoolteachers, engineers, attorneys and instrument-makers. The latter group included some of the most scientifically eminent members of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century: the sailor James Cook (geography), the printer Benjamin Franklin (electricity), the teacher and preacher Joseph Priestley (chemistry), the instrument-maker and engineer James Watt (chemistry), the musician William Herschel (astronomy), and the silk weaver and optician John Dollond (optics). None of these men were gentlemen (though many of their sons or grandsons became so) yet they made science and were acknowledged to have done so; their papers were published and their best work awarded medals.

Since the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny.

The bitterness and protracted character of the biometrician–Mendelian debate has long aroused the interest of historians of biology. In this paper, we focus on another and much less discussed facet of the controversy: competing interpretations of the inheritance of mental defect. Today, the views of the early Mendelians, such as Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, are universally seen to be mistaken. Some historians assume that the Mendelians' errors were exposed by advances in the science of genetics. Others believe that their mistakes could have been identified by contemporaries. Neither interpretation takes account of the fact that the lapses for which the Mendelian eugenicists are now notorious were, in fact, mostly identified at the time by the biometricians David Heron and Karl Pearson. In this paper we ask why their objections had so little impact. We think the answer illustrates an important general point about the social prerequisites for effective scientific critique.