In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one that deserves to appear in the history of science’. From the time Herschel published his first paper in the Philosophical transactions in 1781, he was subjected to the suggestion of lunacy. His patron and friend William Watson, told him that after his claims for the extraordinary power of his telescopes, ‘your prognosis that some would think you fit for Bedlam has been verified’. On learning of Herschel's supremely accurate new micrometer, the astronomer Alexander Aubert exclaimed to Herschel that ‘we would go to Bedlam together’: Aubert wrote to Herschel in January 1782 that he should ‘mind not a few jealous barking puppies: a little time will clear up the matter, and if it lays in my power you would not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party’.

Historians of seventeenth-century science have frequently asserted that Kepler's laws of planetary motion were largely ignored between the time of their first publication (1609, 1619) and the publication of Newton's Principia (1687). In fact, however, they were more widely known and accepted than has been generally recognized.

Kepler's ideas were, indeed, rather slow in establishing themselves, and until about 1630 there are few references to them in the literature of the time. But from then onwards, interest in them increased fairly rapidly. In particular, the principle of elliptical orbits had been accepted by most of the leading astronomers in France before 1645 and in England by about 1655. It also received quite strong support in Holland.

The second law had a more chequered history. It was enunciated in its exact form by a few writers and was used in practice by some others without being explicitly formulated, but the majority, especially after 1645, preferred one or another of several variant forms which were easier to use but only approximately correct. The third law attracted less interest than the others, chiefly perhaps because it had no satisfactory theoretical basis, but it was correctly stated by at least six writers during the period under review.

Between about 1630 and 1650 Kepler's Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (in which all three laws were clearly formulated) was probably the most widely read work on theoretical astronomy in northern and western Europe, while his Rudolphine Tables, which were based upon the first two laws, were regarded by the majority of astronomers as the most accurate planetary tables available.

Kepler's work certainly did not receive all the recognition it deserved, but the extent to which it was neglected has been much exaggerated.

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed.

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time.

This paper deals with one of the first attempts to measure simple reactions in humans. The Swiss astronomer Adolph Hirsch investigated personal differences in the speed of sensory transmission in order to achieve accuracy in astronomy. His controversial results, however, started an intense debate among both physiologists and astronomers who disagreed on the nature of these differences. Were they due to different eyes or brains, or to differences in skill and education? Furthermore, they debated how to eliminate them. Some, for example, wanted to eliminate the observer, and prescribed the use of new technologies like the electro-chronograph or photography, while others believed in discipline and education. By debating the nature of these differences, astronomers and physiologists sketched both different conceptions of ‘man’ and different paths to objectivity. These diverse conceptions, moreover, were tied to current nineteenth-century debates, such as the benefits or disadvantages of railroads, telegraphy and the standardization of time and longitudes. By focusing on the debates surrounding the speed of sensory transmission, this paper reevaluates the history of astronomy, physiology and experimental psychology. Furthermore, in investigating astronomy's relation to the human sciences, it uncovers profound connections in the traditionally separate histories of objectivity and the body.

L'heure sera distribuée dans les maisons,

comme l'eau ou le gaz.

Adolph Hirsch

The conventional view of the prehistory of Newton's synthesis in the Principia of his predecessors' work in planetary theory and terrestrial gravitation is still not seriously changed from that which Newton himself chose to impose on his contemporaries at the end of his life. In his own words:

‘… the same year ‘1666’ I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon & having found out how to estimate the force wth wch [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere from Keplers rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their Orbs, & having deduced that the forces wch keep the Planets in their orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about wch they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly …’

The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors.

Darwin is well known for his wondrously ambiguous rhetoric. The author who used an ‘entangled bank’ as his metaphor for Nature and its complex relationships built up the substance of his text from a corresponding entanglement of unresolved theoretical relations. Ambiguous positions, arguments that seem to fold in on themselves, vacillations, contradictions, and pluralities of explanation suffuse Darwin's science and its constituent metascience. The Origin abounds in ambiguities with regard to the technical features of evolutionary biology. But the domain of ambiguity I wish to address is Darwin's metaphysical stance. I want to approach the question of Darwin and secularization through what might be called the trope of ambiguity. My principle concern is with the origins of that ambiguity. These lie in the conflicting cultural and ideological resources Darwin used to construct the theory of natural selection.

Wee people at London, are so humbly immersd in slavish business, & taken up wth providing for a wretched Carkasse; yt there's nothing almost, but what is grosse & sensuall to be gotten from us. If a bright thought springs up any time here, ye Mists & Foggs extinguish it again presently, & leaves us no more, yn only ye pain, of seeing it die & perish away from us. Humphrey Ditton to Roger Cotes, ca. 1703

THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

During the last decade of his life, Sir Isaac Newton took the measure of achievement. Probably shortly before 1725, Newton scribbled on the undated cover of a letter a brief list of those discoveries he believed belonged entirely ‘to the English’. Included were ‘the variation of the Variation’ (magnetic declination); the circulation of the blood; telescopic sights and the micrometer variously improved by his contemporaries, Robert Hooke and John Flamsteed; and ‘the Libration of the Moon’ likely in reference to Newton's own explanation of lunar eccentricity. Notably, this was not simply a personal calculation. Newton makes no mention of such controversial matters as the fluxional calculus, the refraction of light, or even the measure of universal gravitation, which he otherwise might have claimed as his own efforts. Even the private lights of the solitary genius could still accommodate a distinctly broader sense of the depth of national accomplishment.

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale, later physique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation.

‘Our’ included not only Hooker and Huxley but their fellow-members of the X-Club. ‘Our time’ had been the 1870s and early 1880s. For a five-year period from November 1873 to November 1878 Hooker had been President of the Society, Huxley one of the Secretaries, and fellow X-Club member, William Spottiswoode, the Treasurer. Hooker was followed in the Presidency by Spottiswoode, and on Spottiswoode's death in 1883 Huxley was elected President. During this period other X-Club members—Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, George Busk, Sir John Lubbock, and Thomas Hirst—were ordinary members of the Council of the Society. As the Table below (p. 60) shows, there were at least three members of the X-Club on the Council of the Royal Society from November 1870 until November 1882. On eight occasions in this period there were four or more X-Club members on the Council. ‘Our time’ came to an end in 1885 when ill-health forced Huxley's retirement after only two years in the Presidency, and G. G. Stokes at last became President.

When Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous evolutionary work which caused such a furore in mid-Victorian England, was published towards the close of 1844, Richard Owen, by then well-entrenched as the ‘British Cuvier’, received a complementary copy and addressed a letter to the author. This letter and how it should be interpreted have recently become the subject of historical debate, and this paper is directed at resolving the controversy. The question of Owen's attitude to the Vestiges argument is central to the larger historical problem of the views of this leading British morphologist and palaeontologist on the contentious issue of the ‘secondary causes’ of species. Owen wrote so little directly on this subject prior to 1858, that the letter in question, together with his two letters of 1848 to the rationalist publisher John Chapman, and the controversial conclusion to his On the Nature of Limbs (1849), constitute the major evidence that Owen in this period subscribed to a naturalistic theory of organic change. On the basis of this evidence, historians of biology have generally concurred with Owen's biographer grandson that Owen had a ‘certain leaning towards the theories enunciated by Robert Chambers [the Vestiges' author]’, but that his ‘official’ anti-transmutationist stance of the 1840s did not permit full public expression of his own views. As Ruse most recently summed up this historical consensus: Owen in the 1840s was ‘moving down a path not completely dissimilar from that followed by Chambers’, and he ‘tried to have matters two ways, praising Vestiges to its author and condemning it to its critics’.

This essay is the first account in English to examine Franz Joseph Gall and the origins of phrenology. In doing so a host of legends about Gall and the beginnings of phrenology, which exist only in the English-language historiography, are dispelled. An understanding of the context of phrenology's origins is essential to the historicization of the movement as a whole. The first of two sections in the essay, therefore, introduces Gall's biography and the context in which his provocative science emerged. It is shown to what extent Gall borrowed from other thinkers of his time. I show that Gall's system was meant to be a certain science of human nature. In the second section I analyse the reactions of contemporaries to Gall's important two-year lecture tour of Europe. I conclude that although many critics dismissed Gall as a charlatan, there was no consensus about the proper way to disseminate scientific knowledge or the attributes necessary for the gentleman of science. For example, it was not clear whether science could be profitable, whether it should be shared with lay audiences or whether it could in fact be science at all if it was also entertaining. I argue that in any case Gall's aim was never really to impart science or to disseminate his system. His science and early means of disseminating it were meant to generate elite intellectual status. In this Gall was quite successful.

When HMS Beagle made its first landfall in January 1832, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin set about taking detailed notes on geology. He was soon planning a volume on the geological structure of the places visited, and letters to his sisters confirm that he identified himself as a ‘geologist’. For a young gentleman of his class and income, this was a remarkable thing to do. Darwin's conversion to evolution by selection has been examined so intensively that it is easy to forget that the most extraordinary decision he ever made was to devote his life to the study of the natural world by becoming a geologist. It is only slightly less astonishing that he should have decided to align his work with Charles Lyell's controversial programme of geological reform, which had almost no followers in England.

Van Helmont's chemistry and medicine played a prominent part in the seventeenth-century opposition to Aristotelian natural philosophy and to Galenic medicine. Helmontian works, which rapidly achieved great notoriety all over Europe, gave rise to the most influential version of the chemical philosophy. Helmontian terms such as Archeus, Gas and Alkahest all became part of the accepted vocabulary of seventeenth-century science and medicine.

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night…

John 3: 1–2

A lady asked the famous Lord Shaftesbury what religion he was of. He answered the religion of wise men. She asked, what was that? He answered, wise men never tell.

Diary of Viscount Percival (1730), i, 113

NEWTON AS HERETIC

Isaac Newton was a heretic. But like Nicodemus, the secret disciple of Jesus, he never made a public declaration of his private faith – which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his personal beliefs. His one-time follower William Whiston attributed his policy of silence to simple, human fear and there must be some truth in this. Every day as a public figure (Lucasian Professor, Warden – then Master – of the Mint, President of the Royal Society) and as the figurehead of British natural philosophy, Newton must have felt the tension of outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church, while inwardly denying much of its faith and practice. He was restricted by heresy laws, religious tests and the formidable opposition of public opinion. Heretics were seen as religiously subversive, socially dangerous and even morally debased. Moreover, the positions he enjoyed were dependent on public manifestations of religious and social orderliness. Sir Isaac had a lot to lose. Yet he knew the scriptural injunctions against hiding one's light under a bushel. Newton the believer was thus faced with the need to develop a modus vivendi whereby he could work within legal and social structures, while fulfilling the command to shine in a dark world. This paper recovers and assesses his strategies for reconciling these conflicting dynamics and, in so doing, will shed light on both the nature of Newton's faith and his agenda for natural philosophy.

It is customary to regard ‘tropical medicine’ as a product of the late nineteenth century, ‘its instrument the microscope, its epistemology the germ theory of disease’. The accepted interpretation is that tropical medicine was a European concept: originating in Britain and France and exported to the colonies by pioneering medical scientists. This interpretation is useful inasmuch as ‘tropical medicine’ as a discipline with its own journals, institutions, qualifications, and an exclusive discourse did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and partly in response to metropolitan imperatives. But the European perspective of existing histories of ‘tropical medicine’ has obscured important developments in the understanding of diseases in the tropics which took place prior to 1890; most of which occurred in the colonies themselves – and especially in India. In order to distinguish this body of knowledge from its later, institutional incarnation, it will be referred to here as ‘tropical hygiene’: the term most commonly used by medical men in India until the 1890s.

Extreme variation in the meaning of the term “species” throughout the history of biology has often frustrated attempts of historians, philosophers and biologists to communicate with one another about the transition in biological thinking from the static species concept to the modern notion of evolving species. The most important change which has underlain all the other fluctuations in the meaning of the word “species” is the change from it denoting such metaphysical entities as essences, Forms or Natures to denoting classes of individual organisms. Several authors have taken notice of the role of metaphysics in the work of particular biologists. An attempt will be made in this paper to present a systematic investigation of the role which metaphysics has played in the work of representative biologists throughout the history of biology, especially as it relates to their species concepts.

By the time of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence of 1716 the Newtonian and Leibnizian systems of natural philosophy had reached maturity. Each system consisted of different physical as well as metaphysical principles which, taken together, formed a world view. At the time of their famous debates, Leibniz at 70 and Newton at 74, the founders of two highly developed scientific philosophies, were struggling to establish and defend the ontological and mechanical bases of differing bodies of organized knowledge.

The most striking advances in the knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that the world had ever known—or was to know until the seventeenth century A.D.—took place in Hellenistic Alexandria. The city was founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great. After the tatter's death in 323 B.C. and the subsequent dissolution of his empire, it became the capital of one of his generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who established the Ptolemaic dynasty there. The first Ptolemy, subsequently named Soter (the Saviour), and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus (who succeeded him in 285 B.C.), became immensely enriched by their exploitation of Egypt and raised the city to a position of great wealth and magnificence. Anxious to enhance both their own reputation and the prestige of the kingdom, they sought to rival the cultural and scientific achievements not only of other Hellenistic rulers but even of Athens herself. Their patronage of the arts and sciences, coupled with their establishment of the Museum (an institute for literary studies and scientific research as well as a temple of the Muses), together with the Library, made the city the centre of Hellenistic culture. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, artists, poets and physicians were all encouraged to come and work there.