The following essay is adapted from one with the same title read to the British Society for the History of Science on 20 October 1958—the anniversary, by a striking coincidence, of the birth of W. H. Young (1863–1942). To his memory I dedicated the talk, and now rededicate its publication, not only because I am his daughter and of all that means, but because he invented a method, the method of monotone sequences, which shows the powerfulness of inequalities as a mathematical tool supremely.

The concept of popularization, in the present context, implies the existence of a reading public interested in science, together with a corpus of scientific knowledge, part of which, in its range and complexity, was outside the limits of the general understanding.

This article places the famous images of Johannes Hevelius's instruments in his Machina Coelestis (1673) in the context of Hevelius's contested cometary observations and his debate with Hooke over telescopic sights. Seen thus, the images promote a crafted vision of Hevelius's astronomical practice and skills, constituting a careful self-presentation to his distant professional network and a claim as to which instrumental techniques guarantee accurate observations. Reviewing the reception of the images, the article explores how visual rhetoric may be invoked and challenged in the context of controversy, and suggests renewed analytical attention to the role of laboratory imagery in instrumental cultures in the history of science.

The paper describes an episode in New Zealand science commonly referred to as the moa-hunter debate. In the 1870s the geologist and curator of the Canterbury Museum Julius Haast put forward a proposal that a race distinct from the indigenous Maori hunted the giant flightless birds known as moa to extinction. James Hector, director of the New Zealand Geological Survey and manager of the New Zealand Institute, rejected this proposal and challenged Haast in what would become a bitter fight. Because moa remains in the form of semi-fossilized bones, eggshells and occasionally preserved feathers and skin were important in the debate, the paper will use the analytical method of actor-network theory (ANT) to reopen it. The paper thus provides an opportunity to study the strengths and weaknesses of ANT as a form of analysis. This analysis emphasizes a number of interesting points about the moa-hunter debate, including the ability of human actors to manipulate the meaning of common terms in order to create new theories, in this case Haast's theory of an earlier indigenous race in New Zealand. Though dismissed at the time, this was a belief that has lasted in alternative forms to the present.

‘In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God’. These words—taken out of their theological context—epitomize a common attitude among historians during most of Western history. By definition, there was no history before the advent of writing. Truly, for history, ‘in the beginning was the Word’ and, for nearly six millenia for the historian, ‘the Word was God’. As a consequence, words have dominated both the content and the form of historical works, including documentary editions. The close historical identity between reality and the mind and between ideas and words has reinforced the focus on words. There remain today philosophers who argue that thinking can only occur with words. It is not surprising, then, that a verbal conception of documents continues to dominate historical documentary editing. A few years ago, a famous American historian and documentary editor sought to convince me that documents were by definition, verbal.

An unpublished satirical work, written c.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMS Beagle visited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy's Narrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown work is intriguing not only for its glimpse of the Beagle voyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate.

Recent explorations into Sigmund Freud's intellectual development by Frank Sulloway and Lucille Ritvo have directed attention to the significance of evolutionary theory for psychoanalysis. In this paper I shall pursue the exploration by showing how Darwin was received by members of the so-called Helmholtz circle (Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke) and certain of Freud's teachers in the University of Vienna medical school. I will make the point that the Leibniz–Kant background of these several scientists was important for this reception. I will argue that the Leibniz–Kant tradition came forward to Freud by two roads, Helmholtz's unconscious inference as foundation for a physiology of the senses, and Arthur Schopenhauer's not unrelated uses of the principle of sufficient reason to explain the possibility of lawlikeness in a universe of lawless energies. Finally, I will suggest ways in which Freud received and used the tradition.

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's possible reasons for knowingly fabricating the less credible of the two.

W.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness saw the evolution of altruism from the point of view of the gene. It was at heart a theory of limits, redefining altruistic behaviours as ultimately selfish. This theory inspired two controversial texts published almost in tandem, E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). When Wilson and Dawkins were attacked for their evolutionary interpretations of human societies, they claimed a distinction between reporting what is and declaring what ought to be. Can the history of sociobiological theories be so easily separated from its sociopolitical context? This paper draws upon unpublished materials from the 1960s and early 1970s and documents some of the ways in which Hamilton saw his research as contributing to contemporary concerns. It pays special attention to the 1969 Man and Beast Smithsonian Institution symposium in order to explore the extent to which Hamilton intended his theory to be merely descriptive versus prescriptive. From this, we may see that Hamilton was deeply concerned about the political chaos he perceived in the world around him, and hoped to arrive at a level of self-understanding through science that could inform a new social order.

Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. 204. ISBN 0-472-09548-X, £31.50, $44.50 (hardback); 0-472-06548-3, no price given (paperback).

Michel Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. viii+760. ISBN 0-631-17739-6. £75.00, $100.00.

Michel Serres is one of the best-known philosopher-critics in France, and his name is likely to draw many readers to these two books. With sales of 50,000 copies of his La Légende des anges (1993; trans., Paris, 1995), 100,000 copies of Le Contrat naturel (1990; trans., Ann Arbor, 1995) and 300,000 copies of Le Tiers-instruit (1991; trans., forthcoming), Serres's official eminence (he was elected to the Académie Française in 1990) is more than matched by contemporary popularity. Originally trained in mathematics and logic, Serres undertook doctoral research with Gaston Bachelard – and it shows. Even at his most allusive, Serres's dexterous prose often slips into neat axiomatic and Euclidean certainties, while one can see much of both his aggressively anti-epistemological stance and his easy traffic across the science–poetics divide as an effort to distance himself from his former mentor. But, like Bachelard, Serres has a commanding range, is hugely prolific and writes – if one may say this of one of the ‘Immortals’ – with a glee and innocence that one associates with the rank amateur.

Serres, a professor of the history of science at the Sorbonne, is no amateur. ‘History of science’, he has said, ‘that's my trade’. So it may be, yet many, hearing of his forays into the history of angelology, the natural rights of trees, the iconography of Tintin and the moral status of airport terminals, are entitled to ask whether Serres is to be trusted. Put another way, should one take Serres seriously? The question is worth asking at the outset, for there is little more aggravating than intellectual energy and enthusiasm one feels with hindsight to have been misplaced. How many readers of Michel Foucault, one wonders, were shocked to find him saying in his last lectures that he admired Diogenes the Cynic, the shameless philosopher who masturbated in the Athenian public square, pour épater les bourgeois, so to speak? Maybe Foucault's oeuvre was a similar snub from a maître-penseur – a kind of masterpation, if you will.

This article explores the enticement of consumers for natural philosophy (buyers of books, audiences at public lectures and purchasers of instruments) in London between 1695 and 1720 through advertisements placed in two political newspapers. This twenty-five-year period witnessed both the birth of public science and the rage of party politics. A consideration of public science adverts within the Whig-leaning Post Man and the Tory-leaning Post Boy reveals that members of both the Whig and Tory parties were equally targeted and that natural philosophy was sold to London's reading population in bipartisan fashion. In the process of integrating natural philosophy into the wider culture through commercial sales, political allegiances were not imprinted on the advertising process. This conclusion raises questions regarding the historiographical assertion of Whig-supported public science and Tory opposition to it at the level of consumers.

There are several differences between the theories of matter published by René Descartes in 1637 and 1644 which deserve attention. The differences follow from Descartes's well-known identification of substance with spatial extension, and his consequent rejection of the void. Since there was no void space, Descartes argued, a very finely divided subtle matter must extend throughout the universe in order to fill all space not otherwise occupied by the less finely divided ordinary matter. In the 1637 treatises La dioptrique and Les météores Descartes described only one kind of subtle matter, the primary function of which was to transmit the action of light. Yet when he came to write Principia philosophiae (1644), he believed that the subtle matter was divided into two separate elements. One of these remained an aether for light transmission, but the other had lost this property and was believed instead to be active in magnetic effects and in the electrification of glass, and to form part of the substance of flame.

The establishment of research and development (R & D) laboratories by the UK affiliates of overseas-controlled firms was a feature of the R & D landscape throughout the twentieth century and had its origins even earlier. From their foundation they served as sites for international scientific and technological collaboration and exchange. Here I draw on both quantitative and qualitative evidence to examine the research and development activities of overseas multinational enterprises in the UK. This activity has a longer history than most previous commentators have suggested. The integration of at least some R & D facilities into international research networks was already a feature during the inter-war years. This became far more common after the early 1960s, as firms worked hard to integrate previously independent laboratories into coordinated research organizations. Far from being a ‘new collaborative mode’ in the late twentieth century, cross-border networks of industrial laboratories have long contributed to the internationalization of science.

William Hamilton's celebrated letters, articles and publications embodied his experiences as a direct observer of nature. This paper tracks their different courses through preparation, production, distribution and consumption to expose the networks through which Hamilton's knowledge was made and moved. It makes a detailed study of the changes incurred when his experiences were translated between written, oral, painted and printed formats. Sensitive to contemporary notions of curiosity, it then links these changes to the distinct audiences that each embodiment found. The paper frames each piece as an opportunity for beholders to become virtual witnesses in order to describe people's diverse encounters with Hamilton's work. This model is developed to highlight the agency and diversity of readers and the importance of physical format for the movement of witnessing tools. The exploration of Campi Phlegraei demonstrates how this method of communications study can be a valuable approach to the history of science.

In this paper I address C. A. Coulson's teaching activities, writing textbooks and delivering popular science lectures, as well as his popular lectures on religion and the ‘scientific’ sermons delivered in his capacity as a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. I will pay particular attention to his thoughts on science. His commitment to forging a way to reconcile science and religion was built upon a reflection on the aims and methods of science within the broader framework of science's role in post-Second World War society. By noting that Coulson valued chemistry, mathematics and science in general, as a kind of religious activity, I argue that he wrote masterful textbooks and delivered popular science lectures as lay sermons. These were activities which Coulson pursued energetically to build a community of science adepts and proselytes. And winning young, and indeed not so young, people to science meant teaching them one of the languages that could be used to reach God. In the same way, I extend my argument to his popular lectures on religion and his ‘scientific’ sermons and claim that they should be viewed as popular science lectures addressed to an audience that was often ignorant, or even suspicious, of science.