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.

This article examines the most controversial of the activities of the India Meteorological Department (IMD): long-term seasonal forecasting for the South Asian subcontinent. Under the pressure of recurrent famines, in 1886 the imperial IMD commenced annual issue of monsoon predictions several months in advance, focused on one variable: rainfall. This state service was new to global late nineteenth-century meteorology, attempted first and most rigorously in India. Successive IMD leaders adapted the forecast in light of scientific and infrastructural developments, continuously revising the underlying methods of its production. All methods failed to achieve accurate prevision. Nevertheless, the imperatives of economic administration, empire and public demand compelled IMD scientists to continue annual publication of this unreliable product. This article contends that the seasonal forecast is best understood as an enduring ritual of good governance in a monsoonal environment. Through analysis of newspaper controversies, it suggests that although the seasonal forecast was the most compelling justification for the IMD's imperial and global importance, its limitations undercut popular trust in modern meteorology. Finally, this case illustrates the centrality of ‘tropical meteorology’ to the historical development of modern atmospheric science.

In recent years the historical relationship between scientific experts and the state has received increasing scrutiny. Such experts played important roles in the creation and regulation of environmental organizations and functioned as agents dispatched by politicians or bureaucrats to assess health-related problems and concerns raised by the public or the judiciary. But when it came to making public policy, scientists played another role that has received less attention. In addition to acting as advisers and assessors, some scientists were democratically elected members of local and national legislatures. In this essay I draw attention to this phenomenon by examining how liberal politicians and intellectuals used Darwinian cognitive science to conceptualize the education of children in Victorian Britain.

The expanding interest in book history over recent years has heralded the coming together of an interdisciplinary research community drawing scholars from a variety of literary, historical and cultural studies. Moreover, with a growing body of literature, the field is becoming increasingly visible on a wider scale, not least through the existence of the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing (SHARP), with its newly founded journal Book History. Within the history of science, however, there remains not a little scepticism concerning the practical value of such an approach. It is often dismissed as an intellectual fad or as an enterprise which is illuminating but ultimately peripheral, rather than being valued as an approach which can offer major new insights within the field. This is no doubt in part because much of the most innovative work in history of science over recent years has been carried out by historians anxious to get away from an earlier overemphasis on printed sources. Eager to correct a profoundly unsocial history of ideas, usually rooted in texts, historians have looked increasingly to both the practices and the material culture of science. In such a context, a renewed focus on the history of books sometimes seems like a retrograde step, especially given the common misidentification of ‘books’ with ‘texts’. On the contrary, however, it is just such a twin emphasis on practices and material culture which also characterizes the new book history. Indeed, to the question ‘what is book history for?’ we might answer that its object is to reintroduce social actors, engaged in a variety of practices with respect to material objects, into a history in which books have too often been understood merely as disembodied texts, the meaning of which is defined by singular, uniquely creative authors, and is transparent to readers.

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.

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.

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.

Built in 1769 as a private observatory for King George III, Kew Observatory was taken over in 1842 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It was then quickly transformed into what some claimed to be a ‘physical observatory’ of the sort proposed by John Herschel – an observatory that gathered data in a wide range of physical sciences, including geomagnetism and meteorology, rather than just astronomy. Yet this article argues that the institution which emerged in the 1840s was different in many ways from that envisaged by Herschel. It uses a chronological framework to show how, at every stage, the geophysicist and Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine manipulated the project towards his own agenda: an independent observatory through which he could control the geomagnetic and meteorological research, including the ongoing ‘Magnetic Crusade’. The political machinations surrounding Kew Observatory, within the Royal Society and the BAAS, may help to illuminate the complex politics of science in early Victorian Britain, particularly the role of ‘scientific servicemen’ such as Sabine. Both the diversity of activities at Kew and the complexity of the observatory's origins make its study important in the context of the growing field of the ‘observatory sciences’.

Francis Bacon's position on the existence of void and its nature has been mostly studied with regard to his views on the atom. This approach is undoubtedly right, but it disregards further topics related to Bacon's account of void, namely the world system and the transmutation of bodies. Consequently, a more comprehensive study of Bacon's view on vacuum seems desirable where all the contexts are taken into account. To address this desideratum, the present paper examines Bacon's different views on vacuum drawing attention to the various contexts of the discussion. It also gives an evaluation of the arguments put forward in support of his positions. The first section presents a reconstruction of Bacon's consecutive positions and the reasons for his changes of mind. The second section lists the experimental facts traditionally cited in debates about vacuum and Bacon's interpretation of these. The final section evaluates the role that these experimental facts played in Bacon's arguments. As a result, it is shown that Bacon fits entirely into the general pattern of the early seventeenth century. Empirical arguments by themselves had little value for solving the question of the void; it was also necessary to have a formerly established theory.

It has been a singular privilege to preside over the BSHS as it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. As we share our festivities with the British Association annual meeting at Leeds, I am doubly honoured to be giving this address. A fiftieth anniversary is a sentimental occasion. It is a moment when we can express our gratitude to our many friends and forebears who by their dedication have enabled the Society to grow and flourish. That so many of those friends should be with us to share in our celebration is a source of delight to us all. To our past presidents, former editors, officers and councillors, I extend the warmest welcome. And to our visitors and guests from overseas, I should like to say how much we value your presence and contribution to this conference.

Is there not, then, an incongruous note in my title – a hint of foreboding perhaps? If tempted to speculate on its source one might have wondered whether it is in those rumours we sometimes hear that the end of science is nigh. When we can almost clone humans and almost explain the moment of creation, what is there left? Might the end of science not spell the end of its history? A moment's reflection suggests that this cannot be. After all, the question why science should have come to an end when it did would still keep historians in business. And the more intriguing question of why the end of science has been proclaimed at the end of each of the last four centuries would keep us in business even longer!

This paper will investigate how geographic features were recorded on maps in the eighteenth century in order to outline the construction of geographic knowledge by British mapmakers. Due to practical and economic factors, early modern cartography was a conservative practice based on source compilation and comparison. For the Pacific region especially, the paucity of first-hand observations and the conflicting nature of those observations rendered the world's largest ocean difficult to chart and prone to the retention of mythical continents, passages and islands. After a discussion of the practical and economic reasons why geographic features were difficult to revise on maps, the article focuses on a case study to show how geographic enigmas could be placed and persist. It will use Pepys Island to illustrate the ways in which a chimeric feature could become instilled in geographic parlance.

The Danish Galathea Deep Sea Expedition between 1950 and 1952 combined scientific and official objectives with the production of national and international narratives distributed through the daily press and other media. Dispatched by the Danish government on a newly acquired naval ship, the expedition undertook groundbreaking deep sea research while also devoting efforts to showing the flag, public communication of science, and international cooperation. The expedition was conceived after the war as a way in which to rehabilitate Denmark's reputation internationally and to rebuild national pride. To this end, the expedition included an onboard press section reporting the expedition to the Danish public and to an international audience. The press section mediated the favourable, post-war and postcolonial image of Denmark as an internationalist, scientific, modernizing and civilizing nation for which the expedition planners and many others were hoping. The expedition, therefore, was highly relevant to, indeed fed on, the emerging internationalist agenda in Denmark's foreign policy. Bringing out these aspects of the historical context of the expedition, this paper adds important perspectives to our knowledge about the expedition in particular and, more generally, about scientific exploration in the immediate post-war and postcolonial period.

Anthropological inquiry has often been considered an agent of intellectual secularization. Not least is this so in the sphere of religion, where anthropological accounts have often been taken to represent the triumph of naturalism. This metanarrative, however, fails to recognize that naturalistic explanations could sometimes be espoused for religious purposes and in defence of confessional creeds. This essay examines two late nineteenth-century figures – Alexander Winchell in the United States and William Robertson Smith in Britain – who found in anthropological analysis resources to bolster rather than undermine faith. In both cases these individuals found themselves on the receiving end of ecclesiastical censure and were dismissed from their positions at church-governed institutions. But their motivation was to vindicate divine revelation, in Winchell's case from the physical anthropology of human origins and in Smith's from the cultural anthropology of Semitic ritual.

In 1871, the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher published the results of a detailed chemical analysis of pus cells, in which he showed that the nuclei of these cells contained a hitherto unknown phosphorus-rich chemical which he named ‘nuclein’ for its specific localisation. Published in German, ‘Ueber Die Chemische Zusammensetzung Der Eiterzellen’, [On the Chemical Composition of Pus Cells] Medicinisch-Chemische Untersuchungen (1871) 4: 441–60, was the first publication to describe DNA, and yet remains relatively obscure. We therefore undertook a translation of the paper into English, which, together with the original article, can be accessed via the following link https://doi.org/10.1017/S000708742000062X. In this paper, we offer some intellectual context for its publication and immediate reception.

The development of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century permitted images in a range of visual media to be published in the press. Focusing on the popular scientific monthly Knowledge, this paper explores the evidentiary status of reproductions of astronomical photographs. After succeeding its founder Richard Anthony Proctor in 1889, the new editor of Knowledge, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, introduced high-quality collotype reproductions into each number of the magazine. One of Ranyard's main interests was the structure of the Milky Way, evidence for which was only available through astronomical photographs. As Ranyard reproduced photographs in support of his arguments, he blurred the boundaries between the published collotype, the source negative and the astronomical phenomena themselves. Since each of these carried different evidentiary value, the confusion as to what, exactly, was under discussion did not go unremarked. While eminent astronomers disputed both Ranyard's arguments and the way in which they were presented, Knowledge disseminated both striking astronomical images and also a broader debate over how they should be interpreted.