In most of the more lively fields of physical enquiry in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, a striking contrast may be observed between the antiquity of the problems attacked, and the innovatory procedures applied to solve them. None of these questions, inherited from a past now remote, seemed more pressing than the time-honoured controversy of the plenum versus the vacuum, especially as the concept of the atomic structure of matter was so closely associated with the existence of the void. The more one studies the arguments produced at that time, the more one will be impressed with the value and importance, for the vacuists and the atomists, of the Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria. When we read Galileo's explanation of combustion, “the extremely fine particles of fire, penetrating the narrow pores of the metal (too small to admit even the minutest particles of air or of many other fluids) would fill the minute intervening vacuum, and would set free these minute particles from the forced attraction which these same vacua exert’, we can hear clear echoes of Hero's account of disseminated micro-vacua. Now Hero's work is clearly divided into two sections: a theoretical preface and a collection of 78 “pneumatic devices”. One might be tempted to claim that he, rather than his fellow-atomist Lucretius, inspired the first tentative syntheses of seventeenth-century atomism but it would still be necessary to agree that his chief contributions to the achievements of that generation lie in the experimental techniques which they derived from his instrumentation. Were it not for the popularity of his pneumatic demonstrations, he could never have won such a great reputation as a natural philosopher. Without that reputation, his opinions on this topic would not have been valued as almost equal to those of the mighty Aristotle, especially since he was so decidedly in the minority.

In 1938, doctors Eric Guttmann and Walter Maclay, two psychiatrists based at the Maudsley Hospital in London, administered the hallucinogenic drug mescaline to a group of artists, asking the participants to record their experiences visually. These artists included the painter Julian Trevelyan, who was associated with the British surrealist movement at this time. Published as ‘Mescaline hallucinations in artists’, the research took place at a crucial time for psychiatry, as the discipline was beginning to edge its way into the scientific arena. Newly established, the Maudsley Hospital received Jewish émigrés from Germany to join its ranks. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, this group of psychiatrists brought with them an enthusiasm for psychoactive drugs and visual media in the scientific study of psychopathological states. In this case, Guttmann and Maclay enlisted the help of surrealist artists, who were harnessing hallucinogens for their own revolutionary aims. Looking behind the images, particularly how they were produced and their legacy today, tells a story of how these groups cooperated, and how their overlapping ecologies of knowledge and experience coincided in these remarkable inscriptions.

In 1890 the staff of the Dublin Natural History Museum began a comprehensive rearrangement of the collection in their care. Inspired by visits to American museums and motivated by a desire to produce a truly educational display, curators arranged the zoological collection to include cases on the history and geographical distribution of animals. These cases explicitly depicted, in words and specimens, the main arguments of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Placed at a ground-floor entrance to the museum, the cases invited the visitor to examine the remainder of the collection in terms of evolution by natural selection. The exhibit was supplemented by guidebooks and several lecture-demonstrations, which served to further reinforce its messages. Through an analysis of the exhibit's development and contents, this paper will show how these cases reflected not only the status of evolutionary thinking in Ireland, but also the curators' goals for the future development of Irish natural history.

The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfast's intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science.

In the midsummer of 1872 a lighthouse apparatus was installed in the Clock Tower of the House of Commons. The installation served the practical function of communicating at a distance when the House was sitting, but also provided a highly visible symbolic indication of the importance of lighthouse technology to national concerns. Further, the installation served as an experimental space in which rival technological designs, with corresponding visions for the lighthouse system, could compete in public. This article considers nineteenth-century lighthouse technology as a case study in the power and political significance of display. Manufacturers of lighthouse lenses, such as the firm of Chance Brothers, sought to manage interpretations of the lights through the framing of exhibitions and demonstrations; so too did scientific authorities, including Michael Faraday and John Tyndall, both of whom served in the role of scientific adviser to Trinity House, the body responsible for lighthouse management. Particularly notable in this process was the significance of urban, metropolitan display environments in shaping the development of the marine lighthouse system around the nation's periphery.

During the inter-war years women found employment for the first time in some of Britain's industrial laboratories, most of them concentrated in the food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, textiles and photographic industries. Drawing on a range of sources, including company archives and the technical press, this paper examines the emergence of these new positions for women and considers their workplace experiences, looking both at women with higher-level qualifications and at those who worked as laboratory assistants. It argues that although the entry of women into industrial chemistry represented an extension of their opportunities for scientific work, they tended to be employed as ‘women chemists’ to undertake routine tasks seen as especially suited to feminine skills and expertise and to have few opportunities for promotion. Their presence also appears to have changed the nature of men's work, helping to ensure that men could continue to be offered more challenging work and positions which retained the possibility of career advancement.

There are a number of miscellaneous jobs which a girl of 16 can secure, some of which give chances of rising. Girls who become laboratory assistants, if they are intelligent and hard working, can rise to positions where they will earn as much as £3 a week…

R. Strachey, Careers and Opportunities for Women (1934)

In industry, and particularly in those industries where a large number of women are employed – such as food, margarine and jam factories – women are not infrequently engaged in analytical and research laboratories…

R. Pilcher, The Profession of Chemistry (3rd edn., 1935)

This article explores British ‘nuclear culture’ by examining how individuals and groups within British government tried to comprehend nuclear weapons after the advent of the hydrogen bomb in 1952. It argues that thinking about nuclear weaponry was not uniform, and there was no monolithic ‘nuclear culture’ in government. Instead, political and social habits interacted with Cold War experience to create views of the nuclear weapon – nuclear cultures – that varied across government to create a diverse, and shifting, set of ideas – nuclear cultures – about what the nuclear weapon meant in British hands, and the role it played in providing military power and political influence.

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.

Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.

Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

The rapid growth of seventeenth-century science is said to have been facilitated from four main outside channels: the arts, medicine, economic life and war, each of them influencing, to some extent, the important scientific achievements of the latter half of the century. The bitter campaigns of the English Civil War stimulated a rough and ready empiricism, as military necessity brought forth increasing advances in engineering, navigation, cartography, medicine and surgery. And the impetus to inventive genius provided by long experience in the art of war is well exemplified in the career of the Royalist Commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. After nearly forty years of waging war on land and sea, Prince Rupert, German-English nephew of Charles I, spent his retirement in busy experiment; and many of his inventions, though based on his knowledge of weapons, were later adapted for peaceful purposes.

Concluding his discussion of bee reproduction in Book 3 of Generation of Animals, Aristotle makes a famous methodological pronouncement about the relationship between sense perception and theory in natural history. In the very next sentence, he casually remarks that the unique method of reproduction that he finds in bees should not be surprising, since bees have something ‘divine’ about them. Although the methodological pronouncement gets a fair bit of scholarly attention, and although Aristotle's theological commitments in cosmology and metaphysics are well known, scholars have almost universally passed over the comment about bees and divinity in silence. This paper aims to show why that comment is no mere throwaway, and offers an exploration and elaboration of the ways in which divinity operates even at fairly mundane levels in his natural philosophy, as an important Aristotelian explanation for order, proportion and rationality, even in the lowest of animals.

Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers (Kabyles in contemporary parlance), whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical (and racial) classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s.

This essay explores how hormone treatments were used to optimize and normalize individuals under Italian Fascism. It does so by taking the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute − an Italian eugenics and endocrinological centre founded by Nicola Pende in 1926 − as the prime example of a version of eugenics, biotypology, which was based on hormone therapies. This essay first demonstrates that Italian Fascist biopolitics was not only concerned with increasing the size of the Italian population, but also with improving its quality. It suggests that under the Italian Fascist regime hormone therapies became eugenic tools of intervention to improve the Italian race. Second, while Pende's institute purportedly enhanced men and women, its activities show the extent to which the ‘techniques of normalization’ pursued by the Fascist regime were both systematic and invasive.

This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world.

The balloon has long drifted through popular discourse as a symbol of an Enlightenment attitude towards discovery and a Romanticized image of rationality. This article uses two accounts of early British balloon voyages, both published in 1786, and through them attempts to understand the wide range of practices – literary, social, chemical and adventurous – employed by early balloonists in Britain. I argue that the two series of flights recorded by John Jeffries and Vincenzo Lunardi can be read to show two different philosophical ideas of and aspirations for ballooning, each of which is tied to a different British location, and established a different paradigm for the public reception of flight experiments in later years.

Charles Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England … is very well known to historians of science who are aware of its role in the movement to found the British Association for the Advancement of Science and to reform the Royal Society. The work is probably responsible, in large measure, for the assumption that science in Great Britain was in a marked decline in the early decades of the last century, an assumption rarely subject to exact analysis although fairly widely held. Not as widely known is a reply to Babbage written by Gerard Moll of Utrecht and presented to the English reading public by Faraday, one of the men attacked in Babbage's volume. To the best of my knowledge, Babbage's only published rejoinder to Moll appeared in 1851, dismissing Moll and other critics as not having challenged his facts.

It is well known that Richard Hakluyt in a publication of 1581 congratulated Sir Walter Ralegh for employing Harriot to teach him and his many sea captains the sciences of navigation. Even more important, however, was the navigational research carried out by Harriot on behalf of Ralegh. He made important theoretical advances in map theory and in navigational astronomy, carried out the astronomical observations needed for a reform in navigational tables, and designed and himself tested at sea improved navigational instruments. Harriot had many other responsibilities in connexion with Ralegh's enterprises. From August 1585 to June 1586 Harriot was in Virginia, and in 1589 he was listed as one of Ralegh's colonists in Munster. He collected intelligence concerning America for Ralegh, and his publication of 1588 was effective as propaganda for Virginia. Harriot was also entrusted with financial, and even political responsibilities by Ralegh. Instructing Ralegh and his captains in navigation was an important part of Harriot's work but it is more likely that he did this as the occasion demanded, rather than on a regular basis.