Early in June of 1867, Charles Darwin turned back the cover of his copy of the respected quarterly North British Review, to find on its opening pages a lengthy essay attacking his theory of natural selection. As with the vast majority of articles in the Victorian periodicals, the review was anonymous, prompting immediate speculation in Darwin's circle as to the author's identity. It was to be about a year-and-a-half before Darwin would learn that the engineer Fleeming Jenkin had written the essay. By then, Darwin had concluded that the critique was the most valuable he had ever read on The Origin of Species.

During the course of the eighteenth century important changes occurred in the conception of matter held by British natural philosophers. Historians of science have described these changes in different ways, but certain common features can be abstracted from the more recent accounts. First, there was a movement away from Newtonian matter theory, which saw all matter as the various organizations of homogeneous particles and the forces of attraction and repulsion acting between them. In place of this theory increasing favour was shown towards a more empirical or ‘chemical’ approach to matter which assumed the existence of several essentially distinct types of matter each endowed with different specific qualities or properties. Second, there was an increasing tendency to accept activity as a property of matter itself rather than to ascribe it to immaterial forces.

It has become almost traditional for historians of geology to claim that Roderick Murchison (1792–1871) ‘opened to view for the first time’ the fossiliferous rocks below the Old Red Sandstone which Murchison described in his monumental work The Silurian System published in 1839. Murchison himself claimed in the introduction to this work ‘no-one was previously aware of the existence below the Old Red Sandstone of a regular series of deposits, containing peculiar organic remains’. Professor John Phillips expressed the traditional view well when he wrote of the larger area of which Shropshire forms a part: ‘practically before the Summer of 1831 the whole field of the ancient rocks and fossils… was unexplored but then arose two men… Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison and simultaneously set to work to cultivate what had been left a desert’. Against this we must set the statement of George B. Greenough (1778–1855), first president of the Geological Society of London, as reported in 1841. He had ‘frequently expressed a conviction, as a result of his own observations…, that adequate enquiry alone was wanting to prove the existence of a succession of strata in the west of England, and in Wales—not less regular than that which had been demonstrated in the centre and east of the Island.’

‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock … especially in the case of man’, the influential English scientist Francis Galton wrote in 1883. ‘The word eugenics sufficiently expresses the idea.’ During the ensuing half century, Gallon's new word and the underlying theories that he had already begun developing from the evolutionary concepts advanced by his cousin, Charles Darwin, spread throughout the Western world. With Galton's blessing these theories spawned a political movement advocating the enactment of statutes designed to encourage the propagation of eugenically fit human beings and discourage the propagation of eugenically unfit ones. Yet, while such laws were commonly adopted throughout North America and Northern Europe, the British homeland of Galton and Darwin proved reluctant to act by statutory fiat in the field of eugenics.

This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices.

Like other English-speaking peoples around the world, New Zealanders began debating Darwinism in the early 1860s, shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Despite the opposition of some religious and political leaders – and even the odd scientist – biological evolution made deep inroads in a culture that increasingly identified itself as secular. The introduction of pro-evolution curricula and radio broadcasts provoked occasional antievolution outbursts, but creationism remained more an object of ridicule than a threat until the last decades of the twentieth century, when first American and then Australian creationists began fomenting antievolutionism among New Zealanders. Although Stephen Jay Gould assured them in 1986 that they had little to fear from so-called scientific creationism, because it was a ‘peculiarly American’ phenomenon, scientific creationism by the mid-1990s had captured the allegiance of an estimated five per cent of the country and proved especially attractive to Maori and Pacific Islanders. In 1992 New Zealand creationists formed their own antievolution society, Creation Science (NZ).

The Royal Society took as one of its patron saints Francis Bacon, who envisaged the great calling of science as acting as a means of effecting ‘the relief of man's estate’ through a partnership between philosophers and politicians. The object of this paper is to examine the extent to which this goal was realized from the time of the Society's foundation until the end of the eighteenth century. By doing so it attempts to analyse not only the character of the unreformed Royal Society but also that of the unreformed British state, for the argument of this article is that relations between the Royal Society and the government were not fundamentally different from relations between other academies and their governments.

What was different was rather the character of the British state with its oligarchically based patterns of patronage and influence, which contrasted with the clearer lines of government intervention evident in the more centralized and absolutist regimes which predominated on the Continent. From such a perspective the activities of the eighteenth- century Royal Society take on greater significance. The apparent character of a gentlemen's club is transmuted when one considers that in the social and political context of the eighteenth century such an institutional milieu helped to link the Royal Society to the workings of government. True, as the paper demonstrates, in the first half of the century such linkages were more potential than real, but in the second half of the century they began to be realized, setting the stage for a fruitful partnership between British science and government which was to develop in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries as the Royal Society acted as the principal agent of government advice – a belated realization of the Baconian ideal.

In his presidential address to the chemistry section of the British Association in 1907, Arthur Smithells pointed to work in radioactivity with wonder, calling it the ‘chemistry of phantoms’. Indeed, the transitory nature of the radioelements, coupled with the exceedingly small quantities commonly handled, made many a traditional chemist hesitant to accept these unusual substances as real elements worthy of insertion into the periodic table. Besides, there were too many of them: by 1913 over thirty radioelements were known, but there were no more than twelve boxes in the periodic table in which to house them. Moreover, there was much confusion about radioelements that had different physical properties such as half-life and range of emitted alpha particle, but which could not be separated chemically. Small wonder then that Alexander Russell, the only person who worked with both Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, recalled the prevalent attitude of chemists as discouraging of interpretative attempts: theirs was, so they claimed, ‘an experimental science. No good ever came from pontificating on the ways of Nature from the comfort of an armchair. The laboratory bench, not the sofa, … was where the truth would be found’.

This essay explores how Viennese physicists who specialized in radioactivity research embodied visions of their new discipline in material terms, through the architectural design and the urban location of their institute. These visions concerned not only the experimental culture of radioactivity, or the interdisciplinarity of the field, but also the gendered experiences of those working in the institute's laboratories, many of who were women. In designing the Institute for Radium Research at the end of the 1910s – the first such specialized institute in Europe – physicists and architects were also designing the new discipline in a strong sense. In the architectural form of the building one can trace the aesthetics of the new discipline, the scientific exchanges of its personnel and the image of a newly formed community in which women were more than welcomed.

This paper investigates Margaret Cavendish's characterization of experimental philosophers as hybrids of bears and men in her 1666 story The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. By associating experimental philosophers, in particular Robert Hooke and his microscope, with animals familiar to her readers from the sport of bear-baiting, Cavendish constructed an identity for the fellows of the Royal Society of London quite unlike that which they imagined for themselves. Recent scholarship has illustrated well how Cavendish's opposition to experimental philosophy is linked to her different natural-philosophical, political and anthropological ideas. My contribution to this literature is to examine the meanings both of bears in early modern England and of microscopes in experimental rhetoric, in order to illustrate the connection that Cavendish implies between the two. She parodied Hooke's idea that his microscope extended his limited human senses, and mocked his aim that by so doing he could produce useful knowledge. The bear-men reflect inhuman ambition and provide a caution against ignoring both the order of English society and the place of humans in nature.

In the 1930s, two concepts excited the European biological community: the organizer phenomenon and organicism. This essay examines the history of and connection between these two phenomena in order to address the conventional ‘rise-and-fall’ narrative that historians have assigned to each. Scholars promoted the ‘rise-and-fall’ narrative in connection with a broader account of the devitalizing of biology through the twentieth century. I argue that while limited evidence exists for the ‘fall of the organizer concept’ by the 1950s, the organicism that often motivated the organizer work had no concomitant fall – even during the mid-century heyday of molecular biology. My argument is based on an examination of shifting social networks of life scientists from the 1920s to the 1970s, many of whom attended or corresponded with members of the Cambridge Theoretical Biology Club (1932–1938). I conclude that the status and cohesion of these social networks at the micro scale was at least as important as macro-scale conceptual factors in determining the relative persuasiveness of organicist philosophy.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe* (1749–1832) believed that in 1784 he demonstrated the presence of the intermaxillary (premaxillary) bone in man, and that after a certain amount of opposition professional anatomists accepted his findings. This paper tries to show what the anatomical facts are, what it was that Goethe discovered, how his beliefs about his contribution and influence arose, and how his discovery is related to his general scientific aims and methods.

In the late eighteenth century, which was for Scotland in many ways an ‘Age of Improvement’, the University of Edinburgh enjoyed a golden age. Under the enlightened principalship of the Reverend William Robertson, the University offered wide, flexible, and mainly secular courses of study which were taught by conspicuously able professors. If we restrict ourselves to scientific chairs, a roll-call of their occupants is distinctly impressive: John Robison (natural philosophy, 1774–1805); John Playfair (mathematics, 1785–1805); John Walker (natural history, 1779–1804); Daniel Rutherford (botany, 1786–1819); James Gregory (theory of medicine, 1776–89); William Cullen (practice of medicine, 1773–90); Alexander Monro secundus (anatomy, 1758–98); and their doyen Joseph Black (chemistry and medicine, 1766–99), ‘so pale, so gentle, so elegant, and so illustrious’. The scientific eminence of the University at that time is, of course, widely acknowledged.

Even at the level of the most elementary arithmetical operations, procedures and practices change. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an unusually well documented development took place: at the beginning of the period the authors of elementary manuals of computation taught the use of the abacus, whereas at the end they described the method of calculation which came to be known as the algorism. Their ideas about number, however, were still largely drawn from Boethius's rendering of Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to arithmetic in the Arithmetica and there had been little progress in attempting to reconcile Boethius's teaching on the theory of number with the rather different assumptions that underlie the methods of practical calculation. Boethius and Nicomachus, for example, emphasize that one is not a number but the source of number, and they are aware of the special problems posed by ‘two’. Nicomachus questions whether ‘two’ is anything more than an embodiment of the principle of ‘otherness’; for him, it is open to dispute whether it can be rated a number in its own right. For the teacher of the skills of calculation, ‘one’ and ‘two’ are merely digits like any other. By the fourteenth century, collections of textbook material on elementary arithmetic provided the student with instruction in both theory and practice. The abacus manuals are missing from many such collections because by then the abacus has apparently been relegated to the status of a simple practical aid, but the other elements in medieval arithmetical studies are variously covered.

Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala's anti-smallpox campaigns in the 1780s and 1790s, this paper interweaves an analysis of the contribution of colonial medical knowledges and practical experiences with the construction and implementation of imperial science. The history of the anti-smallpox campaigns is traced from the introduction of inoculation in Guatemala in 1780 to the eve of the Spanish Crown-sponsored Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition in 1803. The paper first analyses the development of what Guatemalan medical physician José Flores called his ‘local method’ of inoculation, tailored to material and cultural conditions of highland Maya communities, and based on his more than twenty years of experience in anti-smallpox campaigns among multiethnic populations in Guatemala. Then the paper probes the accompanying transformations in discourses about health through the anti-smallpox campaigns as they became explicitly linked to new discourses of moral responsibility towards indigenous peoples. With the launch of the Spanish Vaccination Expedition in 1803, anti-smallpox efforts bridged the New World, Europe and Asia, and circulated on a global scale via the enactment of imperial Spanish health policy informed, in no small part, by New World and specifically colonial Guatemalan experiences with inoculation in multiethnic cities and highland Maya towns.

Commemoration is a theme to which historians are paying increasing attention, especially to its manifestations in the twentieth century and in relation to war. The formal remembrance of science is an important historical phenomenon, which demands approaches that take account of its distinctive and highly complex relationships with public life. Over the last four hundred years, peer groups and specialized institutions have sought to celebrate selected achievements and to bring those achievements to wider audiences. This address discusses some of the devices and ideas by means of which innovations were turned into cultural items that could be disseminated. Such items included portraits and monuments. As its main examples, the address uses Edward Jenner and vaccination, and the marking of anniversaries.

This article uses the case of pregnancy testing in Britain to investigate the process whereby new and often controversial reproductive technologies are made visible and normalized in mainstream entertainment media. It shows how in the 1980s and 1990s the then nascent product placement industry was instrumental in embedding pregnancy testing in British cinema and television's dramatic productions. In this period, the pregnancy-test close-up became a conventional trope and the thin blue lines associated with Unilever's Clearblue rose to prominence in mainstream consumer culture. This article investigates the aestheticization of pregnancy testing and shows how increasingly visible public concerns about ‘schoolgirl mums’, abortion and the biological clock, dramatized on the big and small screen, propelled the commercial rise of Clearblue. It argues that the Clearblue close-up ambiguously concealed as much as it revealed; abstraction, ambiguity and flexibility were its keys to success.

Darwinian ideas were developed and radically transformed when they were transmitted to the alien intellectual background of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. The earliest references to Darwin in China appeared in the 1870s through the writings of Western missionaries who provided the Chinese with the earliest information on evolutionary doctrines. Meanwhile, Chinese ambassadors, literati and overseas students contributed to the dissemination of evolutionary ideas, with modest effect. The ‘evolutionary sensation’ in China was generated by the Chinese Spencerian Yan Fu's paraphrased translation and reformulation of Thomas Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture ‘Evolution and ethics’ and his ‘Prolegomena’. It was from this source that ‘Darwin’ became well known in China – although it was Darwin's name, rather than his theories, that reached Chinese literati's households. The Origin of Species itself began to receive attention only at the turn of the twentieth century. The translator, Ma Junwu (1881–1940), incorporated non-Darwinian doctrines, particularly Lamarckian and Spencerian principles, into his edition of the Chinese Origin. This partially reflected the importance of the pre-existing Chinese intellectual background as well as Yan Fu's progressive ‘evolutionary paradigm’. In this paper, I will elucidate Ma Junwu's culturally conditioned reinterpretation of the Origin before 1906 by investigating his transformation of Darwin's principal concepts.

In 1953 Marshall Clagett presented a preliminary scheme of the medieval Latin versions of Euclid's Elements. Since then a considerable body of these texts has become available in critical editions, thanks to Clagett's labours on the Archimedean tradition and H. L. L. Busard's work on the Euclidean versions. Further, Busard, M. Folkerts, R. Lorch and C. Burnett have scrutinized the pivotal ‘second’ version of Adelard of Bath, and have thereby exposed a diversity of text forms that spells real complications for the effort to establish its provenance and use. In his recent overview of the medieval Euclidean tradition, Folkerts displays not only how these studies have filled out and expanded upon Clagett's initial framework, but also how they have compelled rethinking of some basic issues, such as on the source relations and authorship of the various versions.

The appearance of Priestley's electrical work as a brief and irrelevant prelude to his more substantial chemical enquiries may explain why it has been strangely overlooked by historians of science. It was only fairly recently that Sir Philip Hartog sought to rectify this situation with the affirmation that ‘Priestley's electrical work offers the key to Priestley's scientific mind’. Attacking traditional chemical historiography for tracing Priestley's opposition to Lavoisier's theory to a deficiency in his scientific sensibilities, Hartog insisted that Priestley's natural philosophy can properly be understood only in relation to his ‘profound convictions on scientific method’ as fully expressed in the History of electricity. Only thus would Priestley's scientific thought be related correctly to his ‘work as a whole’.