In 1879 G. H. Lewes described the state of current British mental science. There were, he maintained, three main ‘schools’ of psychology. The first of these Lewes called the ‘ontological’ school; its members traced their lineage to Thomas Reid and to the common sense philosophers of the early nineteenth century, especially Dugald Stewart and William Hamilton. The second school was the ‘empirical’, which stood in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill. The ontologists and the empiricists differed in their theories of knowledge: the former held that certain beliefs were native to the mind; the latter that all ideas originated, mediately or immediately, from experience. However, both schools agreed on the object of psychological enquiry. They ‘quietly ignore the complex conditions of the living organism, and treat mental facts simply as the manifestations of a Psychical Principle’. Further, the ontological and empiricist schools concurred on the means by which this principle should be studied; both made introspection the ‘exclusive method of research’.

The Geological Society of London was the first learned society to be devoted solely to geology, and its members were responsible for much of the spectacular progress of the science in the nineteenth century. Its distinctive character as a centre of geological discussion and research was established within the first five years from its foundation in 1807. During this period its activities were directed, and its policies largely shaped, by its President, George Bellas Greenough, on whose unpublished papers this account is chiefly based.

The Society began as a small scientific dining club in London, but it developed rapidly into a learned society with a nation-wide membership. It became so independent in outlook and so active in research that it was felt to threaten the esteem of the Royal Society; and little more than a year after its foundation it clashed with the Royal Society (and especially with its President Sir Joseph Banks) so violently that its continued existence was for a time uncertain.

Its development into a large independent society was the outcome of its ‘Baconian’ view of the importance of collecting geological facts as a surer basis for geological theories. For this purpose it initiated an ambitious scheme for co-operative research, which would unite the efforts of ‘philosophers’ with those of ‘practical men’. Only personal reasons seem to have kept the most prominent of the practical men—William Smith—from co-operating with the Society.

On 30 April, 1897, J. J. Thomson announced the results of his previous four months' experiments on cathode rays. The rays, he suggested, were negatively charged subatomic particles. He called the particles ‘corpuscles’. They have since been re-named ‘electrons’ and Thomson has been hailed as their ‘discoverer’. Contrary to the accounts of most later writers, I show that this discovery was not the outcome of a concern with the nature of cathode rays which had occupied Thomson since 1881 and had shaped the course of his experiments during the period 1881–1897. An examination of his work shows that he paid scant attention to cathode rays until late 1896.

In 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants, a heavy volume of nearly six hundred pages in which he presented the results of many years of experiments conducted with his son Francis on the reaction of plants to the influence of light and gravity. His results contradicted the observations and explanations of the same phenomena offered by the German plant physiologist Julius Sachs in his influential Lehrbuch der Botanik (1868, English translation 1875). Darwin wished rather to ‘convert him than any other half-dozen botanies put together’. Sachs, however, regarded Darwin's work with contempt. Taking up the topic in his Vorlesungen über Pflanzenphysiologie in 1882 and taking issue especially with Darwin's experiments on the movement of root radicles in reaction to gravity, he remarked sharply: In such experiments with roots not only is great precaution necessary, but also the experience of years and extensive knowledge of vegetable physiology, to avoid falling into errors, as did Charles Darwin and his son Francis, who, on the basis of experiments which were unskilfully made and improperly explained, came to the conclusion, as wonderful as it was sensational, that the growing point of the root, like the brain of an animal, dominates the various movements in the root.

From its inception, Victorian commentators on the telegraph appeared fascinated by its apparent capacity to break down barriers of space and time. They waxed lyrical over the ways in which the telegraph would bring nations closer together, break down boundaries and foster commerce. They also eulogized the ways in which the telegraph could be used as a seemingly effortless instrument of discipline. A great deal of work was needed to uphold such fantasies and make the telegraph work. This paper highlights efforts to establish a telegraphic time signal from Greenwich as an example of the labour and management required to sustain such rhetoric. Finally, the paper focuses on the increasingly common metaphor linking the telegraph network and the nervous system. It suggests that the metaphor worked for the Victorians because both systems were held to operate through the instantaneous transmission of intelligence as a means of maintaining bodily and social discipline.

The three translations of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation invested the text with new meaning. None of the translations endorsed the book for the author's advocacy of species transformation. The first translation, into German (1846), put forward the text as evincing divine design in nature. The second, into Dutch (1849), also presented Vestiges as proof of divine order in nature and, more specifically, as aiding the stabilization of society under God and king in a process of recovery from the 1848 Revolution. By contrast, the third translation, into German (1851), interpreted the book as furthering the very revolutionary, anti-ecclesiastical and anti- monarchist ideals that the Dutch edition sought to counter.

The institutionalization of natural knowledge in the form of a scientific society may be interpreted in several ways. If we wish to view science as something apart, unchanging in its intellectual nature, we may regard the scientific enterprise as presenting to the sustaining social system a number of absolute and necessary organizational demands: for example, scientific activity requires acceptance as an important social activity valued for its own sake, that is, it requires autonomy; it is separate from other forms of enquiry and requires distinct institutional modes; it is public knowledge and requires a public, universalistic forum; it is productive of constant change and requires of the sustaining social system a flexibility in adapting to change. Support for such an interpretation may be found in the rise of modern science in seventeenth-century England, France, and Italy and in the accompanying rise of specifically scientific societies. Thus, the founding of the Royal Society of London may be interpreted as the organizational embodiment of immanent demands arising from scientific activity—the cashing of a blank cheque payable to science written on society's current account.

As is widely known, the Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation (1833–36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756–1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. Less widely appreciated is the extent to which the Bridgewater Treatises rank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and ‘celebrity’, resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series ‘encouraged other competitors into the field’, most notably Charles Babbage's unsolicited Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837). As late as 1882 the political economist William Stanley Jevons was intending to write an unofficial Bridgewater Treatise, and even an author of the prominence of Lord Brougham could not escape having his Discourse of Natural Theology (1835) described by Edward Lytton Bulwer as ‘the tenth Bridgewater Treatise’.

This paper documents an important development in Robert Boyle's natural-philosophical method – his use from the 1660s onwards of ‘heads’ and ‘inquiries’ as a means of organizing his data, setting himself an agenda when studying a subject and soliciting information from others. Boyle acknowledged that he derived this approach from Francis Bacon, but he had not previously used it in his work, and the reason why it came to the fore when it did is not apparent from his printed and manuscript corpus. It is necessary to look beyond Boyle to his milieu for the cause, in this case to the influence on him of the Royal Society. Whereas the Royal Society in its early years is often seen as putting into practice a programme pioneered by Boyle, this crucial methodological change on his part seems rather to have been stimulated by the society's early concern for systematic data-collecting. In this connection, it is here shown that a key text, Boyle's influential ‘General Heads for a Natural History of a Country, Great or small’, published in Philosophical Transactions in 1666, represents more of a shared initiative between him and the society than has hitherto been appreciated.

The British Psychological Society having established a ‘Philosophy and History’ section, a fresh look at the nature of the History of Psychology is called for. In this paper, I would like to make a contribution to this by raising some conundrums which have yet to be adequately addressed. First, though, what has happened in the History of Psychology so far? Psychologists have been writing histories of their discipline since the turn of the century; Baldwin's History of Psychology appeared in 1913, for example, and the first volume of G. S. Brett's trilogy of the same title in 1912, a year which also saw Dessoir's Outlines of the History of Psychology translated into English. This early work was clearly aimed at providing a respectable genealogy for the nascent discipline; only about a fifth of Baldwin's work actually deals with experimental or empirical Psychology dating from later than the mid-nineteenth century, while Brett treats scientific approaches virtually as a coda to a survey of the history of the philosophy of mind. Psychology is presented as the legitimate heir to the main western philosophical tradition, sired on it, so to speak, by physiologists such as Helmholtz, Muller and Broca. In 1929, E. G. Boring published the first edition of his A History of Experimental Psychology, which dominated the field for decades along with Gardner Murphy's Historical Introduction of Modern Psychology of 1928, a lighter weight work but with a somewhat broader range, which served as an introductory text. Both went into subsequent editions, the latter as recently as 1972 (much enlarged). The series The History of Psychology in Autobiography, begun in 1930 and now in its seventh volume (1980), contains professional autobiographies by the ageing eminent of varying levels of self-disclosure, wit and informative value. It is not, however, until the 1960s that a self-conscious sub-discipline calling itself ‘History of Psychology’ emerges within Psychology, being pioneered by the late R. I. Watson in the United States. New histories begin appearing, including Kantor's very positivistic The Scientific Evolution of Psychology Vol. 1 of 1963 and Hearnshaw's A Short History of British Psychology of 1964. In 1965, the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences was started, formally signalling the arrival of the new sub-discipline on the scene. Subsequent events warrant a more critical appraisal.

The scientific legacy of Karl Pearson and his role as one of the principal architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics, has generated enough interest to have created an intellectual enterprise on various aspects of his life and work. Despite this interest, Pearson's earliest and most formative statistical work which he delivered in thirty of his thirty-eight Gresham lectures from 17 November 1891 to 11 May 1894 has, to date, been given very little consideration. Pearson is perhaps, best known to historians of science for his first eight Gresham lectures, delivered in London in February and May, 1891, on ‘The Scope and Method of Modern Science’, as these lectures were published with modification in the Grammar of Science in 1892. The only discussions which have emerged from some of the other thirty lectures have come from Egon Pearson and Steve Stigler. As the great bulk of these lectures have not been fully utilized, previous attempts to identify the impetus to his statistical work have been derived either from his teaching of correlation at University College London in 1895–96 or from his third statistical paper which, in part, addresses Francis Galton's work on simple correlation and simple regression. In spite of the emphasis on Galton's work on simple correlation and regression, little attention has been given to Pearson's more innovative work in that paper, which includes his development of the following statistical methods: multiple correlation, multiple regression, the standard error of estimate, the coefficient of variation and the use of determinantal matrix algebra for biometrical methods. This use of a higher form of algebra not only provided a most striking departure from earlier forms and uses of statistics, but it led to an increasing specialization in the emerging discipline of ‘mathematical statistics’.

In spite of vigorous opposition by a number of historians it has now become a commonplace that the rapid development of the ‘new philosophy’ sprang from the ideology of Puritanism. What began its career as the ‘Merton thesis’ has now been refined, developed, and so often repeated that it seems to be almost unassailable. However, the two foremost historians in the entrenchment of this new orthodoxy are willing, in principle, to concede that ‘in reality things were very mixed up’, and that non-Puritan natural philosophers at the time were operating ‘in a precisely similar manner’ to their Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, it would be impossible not to concede this in the face of the many critiques launched against the Merton thesis.

Focusing on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies as a case, this article uses economies of research tool exchange to develop a new way of characterizing cross-disciplinary research. Throughout its life from 1960 to 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies hosted scholars from several disciplines. However, there were two different research cultures at the Center. With its directors and patrons committed to a philosophy that equated creative science with eclectic search for and invention of new tools, the Center's initial interdisciplinary research culture emphasized the exchange of ideas and methods. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's multidisciplinary economy involved researchers working in parallel.

Manuscript Add. 3965, section 13, folios 541r–542r and 545r–546r is in the Portsmouth Collection of manuscripts and housed in the University Library, Cambridge. These drafts contain a careful account, in Newton's hand, of his views on place, time, and God. They are part of a large number of drafts relating to the three official editions of the Principia published in Newton's lifetime.

Central to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society was the description and justification of the method adopted and advocated by the Fellows of the Society, for it was thought that it was their method which distinguished them from ancients, dogmatists, sceptics, and contemporary natural philosophers such as Descartes. The Fellows saw themselves as furthering primarily a novel method, rather than a system, of philosophy, and the History gave expression to this corporate self-perception. However, the History's description of their method was not necessarily accurate. Rather, as will be argued below, by a combination of subtle misrepresentation and selective exposition, Sprat portrayed a method which would further the aims of social and ecclesiastical stability and material prosperity, essential for the Royal Society since its continued existence depended upon the creation of a social basis for the institutionalized pursuit of natural philosophy. Some link had to be forged between the activities of the Society and the intellectual and social aspirations of the Restoration. To understand the intent and meaning of Sprat's History and the method there portrayed, we must therefore look to the institutional needs which it fulfilled.

Anyone reading the literature on the history of graphs will soon realize that the use of graphie displays of any type was really quite unusual until the mid-ninetenth century and that those scientists who did make use of them are often familiar to us as creative thinkers in their own fields of endeavour. A ternary diagram (also known as a triangular diagram) is a particular type of graph which consists of an equilateral triangle in which a given plotted point represents the relative proportions (a, b, c) of three end-members (A, B and C), generally expressed as percentages and constrained by a + b + c = 100%. It has long been used to portray sample composition in terms of three constituents, or an observed colour in terms of three primary colours, because it is a convenient means of representing a three-component System in a planar projection, rather than as an isometric, or similar, view of a three-dimensional space. Recent papers suggest that its use is not as familiar to some statisticians as are other commonly used forms of graph. For example, although it was cited by Peddle in 1910 and more recently by Dickinson, it is not discussed in modern texts on statistical graphies nor in the key papers on the history of graphs. However, beginning with studies of colour-mixing in the eighteenth century, it has subsequently become widely used, particularly in geology, physical chemistry and metallurgy. In this paper, I attempt to document its gradual uptake as a standard method of data display and some of the scientific advances which its use has facilitated.

A surge of spatial imagery is sweeping across wide stretches of the academy. Spheres of scholarly endeavour hitherto seemingly immune to matters of space and place have been exploiting the geographical lexicon and appending to it ever more imaginative adjectives. Thus literary critics, cultural historians, psychologists, poets and many others have been uncovering geographies that are variously depicted as ‘tender’, ‘neural’, ‘fabulous’, ‘romantic’ and ‘distracted’. Geographers too have added to this adjectival efflorescence with their staging of ‘hybrid’, ‘malevolent’, ‘phobic’ and ‘sensuous’ geographies – to name but a very few. The analytic power of geographical readings has thus been felt across a broad terrain. Thomas Kaufmann, for instance, has recently developed a ‘historical geography of art’ – or what he calls a ‘geohistory of art’ – in which he mobilizes geographical motifs to explore artistic identity, diffusion, circulation and transculturation. Steven Harris, Peter Burke and many others now routinely speak of the ‘geography of knowledge’. And in her recent account of nineteenth-century American expansionism along the western frontier, Amy DeRogatis has found inspiration in the idea of ‘moral geography’ to throw light on the means by which New England ways of life were transferred to the Western Reserve.