In The life of Richard Owen by his grandson there is an inference to the effect that Owen had objected to his name being used to authorize various statements that Whewell was drafting in opposition to the Vestiges. The inference is drawn from letters that Whewell wrote to Owen on 13 and 15 February 1845. Corroboration of this would corne from a letter of Owen to Whewell, dated 14 February 1845, if extant. Among the Whewell papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, there are several letters from Owen to Whewell, none of which bears that date. There is one, however, dated 14 February 1844 which, on doser inspection, turns out to be the missing link in their correspondance. The evidence for the misdating is not merely that the letter falls naturally into a later sequence. The conclusion is inescapable because Owen refers to an ‘opinion which I have always entertained, and still do strongly, on the subject of a refutation of “Vestiges”’. Since the first edition of Chambers's book did not appear until October 1844, the letter must belong to the following year. My object in this paper is to examine the implications of this letter for a reconstruction of Owen's attitude to that book which Adam Sedgwick could so detest for, among many things, its ‘gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology’.

Since the eighteenth century chemistry has been deemed to be useful, yet how it might find widespread application, particularly in the case of its most advanced developments, was generally unclear. The discovery of synthetic dyestuffs has often been considered as the turning point towards much closer linkage between chemistry and the manufacture of useful products. How this occurred can best be seen in the case of August Wilhelm Hofmann, who for two decades after 1845 was director of the Royal College of Chemistry in London. As the teacher of many pioneers of the dye industry, Hofmann can be considered its first scientific leader. Indeed, the compounds he studied from 1860 were products made in the factories of his former students and assistants. They in turn were the first to recognize Hofmann's role in stimulating the practical application of science. Henry Armstrong, the chemist and educator, went so far as to imply that this was germane to Hofmann's pedagogic and research strategies: ‘it is clear that the influence he exercised in introducing scientific method into industry was in no sense accidental, but the considered expression of innate convictions’. These convictions were also encouraged by the need to attract funds from industrial sponsors for the Royal College of Chemistry, and they charged the rhetoric that served to enhance Hofmann's ambition and the discipline of chemistry before international audiences.

During its centennial celebrations in 2008, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley paid homage to its founding director, Joseph Grinnell. Recognized as a leading scientific institution, the MVZ managed to grow throughout the twentieth century, a period often characterized by the decline of natural history. To understand how and why research flourished at the MVZ, this paper looks closely at Grinnell's undergraduate course, the Natural History of the Vertebrates (NHV). Taught by MVZ affiliates since 1914, the NHV offers an important window on Grinnell's approach and legacy. This paper argues that the NHV contributed to the MVZ's long-term success by acting as, first, a gateway to natural history; second, a vector for the MVZ's research programme; and third, a shared faculty responsibility. Grinnell's significance in the history of science is understated, in part because his writing style de-emphasized the importance of his theoretical contributions, including his development of the niche concept, his emphasis on population thinking and geographic isolation in studies of evolution, and his effort to integrate speciation questions and genetics. Studying the NHV highlights these contributions because Grinnell freely communicated his ideas to his students. An analysis of Grinnell's course material shows that his theoretical and methodological approach pre-dated the evolutionary synthesis and inspired natural-history research throughout the past century.

The FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis has become well known in connection with Einstein's theory of relativity, and its role in the origin of that theory has been the subject of considerable study. But the origins of the contraction idea itself, and particularly of G. F. FitzGerald's first statement of it in 1889, have attracted much less attention and are surrounded by several misconceptions. The hypothesis has usually been depicted as a rather wild idea put forward without any real theoretical justification simply to explain away the troublesome null result of Michelson and Morley's 1887 ether drift experiment. In the words of Gerald Holton, ‘it has traditionally been called the very paradigm of an ad hoc hypothesis’. H. A. Lorentz, who hit upon the contraction idea independently in 1892, has been credited with giving it some justification in terms of his electron theory, but little or none of this credit has been extended to FitzGerald. His statement of the contraction hypothesis has usually been viewed, in the words of his friend R. T. Glazebrook, as nothing more than ‘the brilliant baseless guess of an Irish genius’.

In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.

The remarkable developments in Galileo's theory of motion revealed by his letter to Guidobaldo del Monte in 1602 have never been easy to account for in view of the almost complete lack of direct evidence. By examining the nature of the empirical evidence for the new ideas he advanced in 1602 and his earliest writings on motion in De motu, it is argued that the source of this transformation was his Copernican beliefs. There exists evidence that those beliefs led him to start work on his theory of the tides by 1595, and by 1597 to state to Kepler that Copernicanism had allowed him to account for many otherwise inexplicable phenomena. These comments very probably related to his new study of rotary and linear motion, linked to his theory of circular fall, which it is argued was devised at this point, and to an investigation of the pendulum. Such an investigation would account for his new interest in isochronism and his discovery of the link between linear and circular motion and to the two laws of isochronism announced to Guidobaldo in 1602: that of the pendulum and the law of chords.

This paper explores the transition to synthetic dyestuffs through a principal focus on developments within the last major holdout of the natural-dye industry, the blue colourant indigo. It starts by looking closely at existing practices of cultivation and manufacture of the natural dye in colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also develops a case study based on targeted efforts scientifically to improve plant-derived indigo in laboratories and experiment stations in colonial India and imperial England. Experts attempted to increase yields and enhance the purity of the natural dye to meet the competition of the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo launched on the international market in 1897 by two German firms, BASF and Hoechst. The paper explains the patronage of science by European planters, the colonial state and the metropolitan government and analyses the nature of science that emerged in the colonial–imperial nexus.

... and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.

Brother William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Recreating, as part of doing history, can be a way of reflecting what creating is as part of science. Discussions revolving around historical understanding of the scientific enterprise have recently included strong commitments to turn scientific practice into one of the main objectives of historical study. One specific methodological approach to face up to this assignment is integrating the reconstruction and reperformance of past experiments into the historical analysis of the doing-part in science. This paper deals with the doing-part in history, that is, with the historiographical consequences that might stem from this reconstruction and reperformance of past experimentation. In the course of a four-month period of research I worked with a replica of the so-called ‘actinometer’, an instrument to measure the intensity of solar radiation, which was invented by John Herschel in 1824. On the basis of this example, I try to trace how recent performances of experimental activities can contribute to historical understanding of human agency in scientific practice.

This history of a statement attributed to the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert exemplifies the making and uses of quotations in recent science. Wolpert's dictum, ‘It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life’, was produced in a series of international shifts of medium and scale. It originated in his vivid declaration in conversation with a non-specialist at a workshop dinner, gained its canonical form in a colleague's monograph, and was amplified as a quotation on a poster derived from an undergraduate project. Although it drew on Wolpert's authority and he accepted his authorship, it thus represents a collective sifting of earlier claims for the significance of prenatal existence through the values of 1980s developmental biology. Juxtaposing a technical term with major life events has let teachers engage students, and researchers entice journalists, while sharing an in-joke that came to mark community identity. Serious applications include arguing for an extension of the fourteen-day limit on human-embryo research. On this evidence, quotations have been kept busy addressing every audience of specialized knowledge.

Shortly before his death in 1934, the British historian of chemistry, A. N. Meldrum, published two lengthy articles on Lavoisier's early career in science. After a careful investigation of the collection of manuscripts at the Académie des Sciences in Paris and in light of a detailed and penetrating analysis of Lavoisier's published work, Meldrum concluded that as a youth, Lavoisier was concerned with chemistry only to the extent that he found it useful for his mineralogical and geological researches. Lavoisier began his career as a mineralogist; he became a chemist only in 1772, the “crucial year” when he turned his attention to chemical theory for its own sake and started his famous course of experiments on the nature of combustion and fixed air. Although some details—notably concerning Lavoisier's early education and geological work—have been added to this account since Meldrum's time, the broad conclusions of Meldrum's study are still generally accepted by historians of the chemical revolution.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the largest and wealthiest ‘popular’ scientific establishment in London was the London Institution, founded by a group of prominent City men in 1805. During most of its early years this Institution had over 900 members; within a year of its foundation it had accumulated funds of £76,000, which dwarfed those possessed by any similar body in this period; by 1819 it had erected an imposing building in Finsbury Circus, a structure with a splendid library, a lecture theatre, and provision for laboratories, as well as meeting rooms. In that theatre eminent men of science and literature delivered lectures; by the 1840s William Robert Grove, then in the midst of his scientific career, was installed as ‘Professor of Experimental Philosophy in the London Institution’.

This essay analyses the development of the Carrel-Dakin treatment for infected wounds during the First World War to explore the relationship between industrialized warfare and experimental medicine, the politics of standardization, and the relationship between the theories and practices of physiology and scientific management. It first describes the intellectual and institutional context from which Alexis Carrel's wound research emerged: experimental medicine and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Next the story moves to the experimental laboratory hospital on the Western Front and the quantification of wounds. Then it considers the propaganda and training campaign in support of the method at the War Demonstration Hospital located on the institute's New York City campus. The de-skilling inherent in the standardization of surgical practice was a response to the incompetence of inexperienced military surgeons, but also an attempt to restructure the medical profession into a hierarchical organization capable of being administered by elite scientist–physicians. Underlying the narrative is the paradox of simultaneous segregation of the biological and the social through laboratory practices and their conflation through the organic analogy.

It was in the closing year of the nineteenth century that Paul Tannery organized at an international historical congress the first international meeting devoted to the history of science. If antiquity would make a scholarly subject respectable, scholarship in the history of science must be beyond reproach; still earlier than Tannery and his colleagues in many European countries were the German historian of chemistry Kopp, and William Whewell, Master of Trinity; the eighteenth century had produced substantial works like those on mathematics and astronomy of Montucla and Delambre; Isaac Vossius and others virtually take these studies back to the Renaissance and Polydore Vergil. Just as in our day such classical scholars as Heiberg, Bailey, Housman, Drachman or Peck have chosen scientific texts as their subjects, so in the past, too, learning and science have met on this common ground. Few creative mathematicians of the seventeenth century thought that attention to the writings of Euclid or Archimedes was a waste of time.

The nuclear age had a profound impact on politics and international affairs. More fundamentally, it altered the way people saw the planet and their relationship with it. These attitudes changed gradually in the post-war period, with the 1960s a key transitional moment. This article explores these changing attitudes towards the environment within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the beginning of the 1960s CND's concerns about nuclear testing and fallout fit easily into the dominant anthropocentric view of the environment. However, by the end of the decade they espoused a much more holistic, even ecocentric, attitude. This article examines how attitudes towards the environment were changing in the 1960s through a close examination of attitudes within CND, and argues that the modern environmental movement was a product of the nuclear age.

This article assesses the reputation of Mary Somerville in the 1830s and suggests that critical confusion over her status in the changing world of early nineteenth-century science is not new. Drawing on Somerville’s own writings, contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews, political debates and unpublished manuscripts, Somerville's ‘uniqueness’ as a public figure is examined through the eyes of both the nascent scientific community of the time as well as the wider audience for her work. Somerville's status as a popularizer and an educator is more complicated than may have previously been assumed and can be both confirmed and undermined by an analysis of contemporary public opinion. Although her works were directed at the public who indirectly paid her pension for services to science, Somerville's private and published comments about and within her writings offer an alternative interpretation. Despite an apparent turn to more popular works in order to bolster her finances, Mary Somerville relished the specialist aspect of her writings and valued the difficulties which prevented the ordinary reader from obtaining ultimate insight into celestial mechanics.

The history of the dyestuffs industry during the period 1775–1860 is interesting for three reasons. In the first place it was in connection with the manufacture of synthetic dyestuffs, begun in 1856, that the industrial research laboratory and the organization scientist first unmistakably appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Secondly, there are the enigmas of W. H. Perkin, the man who discovered and manufactured the first coal-tar colours, but who retired somewhat abruptly from the industry in 1874: just after the synthesis of alizarine. Thirdly, the dyestuffs industry was in intimate association with the textile industries which had for a long time been subject to frequent radical scientific and technological innovation. Among the most important of these we may mention John Smeaton's classic paper of 1759 on the maximum work obtainable from a given fall of water: a problem important not only for the abstract science of mechanics, but also for the design of waterwheels—the main source of power for the early textile mills. (The waterwheel was not, during the eighteenth century, the epitome of the quaint and picturesque: it was in the van of scientific and technical progress.) Again, the textile industries were quick to employ the Watt rotative engine; previously a two cylinder Newcomen engine had been tried out. Bleaching powders, based on Scheele's discovery of chlorine and its properties, were rapidly adopted: in this context one cannot help contrasting the indifference of medical science to Davy's early suggestion of using nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic; or Faraday's comment in 1818 on the anaesthetic power of sulphuric ether. The textile industries saw, over this period, a rapid succession of new machines, the pace of invention being so hot that in 1832 Charles Babbage reported that machines became obsolete long before they wore out. A Salford cotton mill was the first industrial establishment to use gas lighting: James Thomson, calico printer, introduced gas lighting to the town of Clitheroe when he installed it in his works. And there were many other important technical and scientific innovations. It was to supply these industries, so well accustomed to change, that the synthetic coal-tar dyestuffs were introduced from 1856 onwards. It is interesting that, so far as we can see, the appearance of these synthetic dyestuffs was the last in the series of major innovations in the textiles and related industries: at least until recent times.

The modern concept of extinction emerged in the Victorian period, though its chief proponent is seldom remembered today. Alfred Newton, for four decades the professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge, was an expert on rare and extinct birds as well as on what he called ‘the exterminating process'. Combining traditional comparative morphology with Darwinian natural selection, Newton developed a particular sense of extinction that helped to shape contemporary, and subsequent, animal protection. Because he understood extinction as a process to be studied scientifically, and because he made that, rather than animal cruelty, the focus of animal protection, Newton provides an important window onto the relationship between science and sentiment in this period. Newton's efforts to bring the two into line around the issue of human-caused extinction reveal an important moment in which the boundaries between science and sentiment, and between those who did and those who did not have the authority to speak for nature, were up for grabs.

It has been traditionally held that the idea of a prime matter of metals was abandoned in the eighteenth century, especially after the failure of Hermann Boerhaave to find it in mercury. However, documents tell a different story: the search for the metalliferous principle, in the form of an odd substance known as Gur, Guhr, Ghur or Bur, was very much alive in the 1700s. This was a project that involved Boerhaave himself, as is shown by his correspondence with J.B. Bassand. The first mention of this strange material appears in Sarepta, a collection of sermons by the sixteenth-century Bohemian preacher Johannes Mathesius, sometimes mentioned in the specialized literature but rarely studied. This paper discusses the various conceptions of this material held as the prime matter of metals, from Mathesius to the eighteenth century, involving reputed authors such as John Webster, Jan B. van Helmont, Georg E. Stahl and Boerhaave.

In his influential Laws of Thought (1854), the mathematician George Boole presented a formulation of logic using algebraic expressions and manipulations. His widow, Mary Everest Boole, undertook an ambitious project of disseminating his ideas by introducing lay audiences to the law of pulsation, a prescription for correct reasoning that incorporates two of his fundamental insights. Contemporary scholarship presents a fragmented picture of Mary Boole, regarding her largely as a source of information on the religio-psychological impetus for her husband's contributions to logic, among other matters. Some studies rightly acknowledge that her better-known commentary on educational reform relates to a promotion of the Laws of Thought, yet these typically fail to expand on how she articulated such relationships for readers. This paper provides a more complete understanding of her efforts by examining texts on various subjects motivated by a dedication to propagating as much as fulfilling the intellectual legacy she associated with her husband. In doing so it considers her interventions – like those undertaken by other Victorian women who sought to cultivate scientific enterprises – within a contextual framework broad enough to include strategic responses to cultural realities and possibilities.