The Cambridge school of animal morphology dominated British zoology in the late nineteenth century. Historians have argued that they were very successful until the death of their leader F. M. Balfour in 1882, when the school all but died with him. This paper argues that their initial success came about because their work fitted well with the university in the 1870s and 1880s. They attempted to trace evolutionary trees by studying individual development. To do this they needed access to species they considered primitive. Balfour made use of his social networks to aid the school and to collect the specimens they needed for their work. The school has been portrayed as failing in the 1890s when students rejected dry laboratory-bound studies. However, a new generation of researchers who followed Balfour had to travel extensively if they were to obtain the organisms they needed. International travel was popular amongst zoologists and the Cambridge school developed their own extensive networks. A new breed of adventurer–zoologists arose, but because of the school's tenuous position within the university they were unable to equal Balfour's success.

Built in Greenwich in 1675–1676, the Royal Observatory was situated outside the capital but was deeply enmeshed within its knowledge networks and communities of practice. Scholars have tended to focus on the links cultivated by the Astronomers Royal within scholarly communities in England and Europe but the observatory was also deeply reliant on and engaged with London's institutions and practical mathematical community. It was a royal foundation, situated within one government board, taking a leading role on another, and overseen by Visitors selected by the Royal Society of London. These links helped develop institutional continuity, while instrument-makers, assistants and other collaborators, who were often active in the city as mathematical authors and teachers, formed an extended community with interest in the observatory's continued existence. After outlining the often highly contingent institutional and personal connections that shaped and supported the observatory, this article considers the role of two early assistants, James Hodgson and Thomas Weston. By championing John Flamsteed's legacy and sharing observatory knowledge and practice beyond its walls, they ensured awareness of and potential users for its outputs. They and their successors helped to develop a particular, and ultimately influential, approach to astronomical and mathematical practice and teaching.

Although Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) is frequently cited by historians in relation to the impact of evolutionary theories on the Victorian churches, attention has not been paid to the audiences of working-class men in Glasgow for whom the papers were originally constructed. By drawing upon the notebook in which the author sketched out the series of addresses, in addition to materials relating to the interpretative habits of these audiences; I am able to consider the text as a work of practical apologetics rather than as a contribution to elite intellectual debate. This paper promises to open up new lines of enquiry with regard to the materials with which working-class audiences attempted to construct their own interpretations of contemporary scientific and religious issues. It also highlights Drummond's hitherto unrecognized use of specific practices of biblical exegesis and his debt to the work of the anatomist Richard Owen which, by keeping different forms of life distinct, and explaining organization as the effect of life already present, allowed the author to visualize the process of descent in terms of an inherent tendency to change in line with the unfolding of a pre-existing plan.

Kepler saw it as one of the chief advantages of the Copernican system that it put order into the planetary motions. Although Copernicus had indeed noted that the planetary periods increase with their distance from the sun, he did not, as far as we know, attempt to find a relationship between the two. Believing that God would not have failed to establish some mathematically precise ratio, Kepler sought from the very first to find it. Thus we see, in some of his earliest surviving letters, his attempts to relate planetary periods to the radii of their orbits using circular quadrants intersected by straight lines. Right from the beginning, Kepler gave the sun that dynamic role that was to characterize his ‘new astronomy based upon physics’. Immediately after describing the nested polyhedra that he believed determined the number and distances of the planets, he wrote:

Next, there is a moving soul and an infinite motion in the sun, and a double decrement of motion in the movables. In the first place, there is the inequality of their circuits, caused by the unequal amplitude of the orbs, which would occur even were the moving power the same in all orbs. But (2) actually this moving power (like light, in optics) is weaker the further it is from the source.

The paper is an attempt to set the social and historical background against which the Royal Institution was founded, and to trace the events in its very early history. The founder of the Institution was Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, that soldier of fortune who took service with the Elector Palatine of Bavaria, and it was in the course of his duties in Munich that his interest in the practical problems of philanthropy was aroused.

In London, in the concluding years of the eighteenth century, he was drawn into the group of philanthropists and reformers among whom William Wilberforce was the leading figure, and Sir Thomas Bernard, Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital, one of the most active members. The focus of their activities was the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, and to this Society Rumford submitted his proposals for a new scientific institution in London, designed to improve the lot of the poor and the working classes by the application of science to useful purposes.

It was decided to make an appeal for funds, Rumford's proposals were circulated, and the Count succeeded in interesting the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, who took the Chair at the early meetings and allowed them to be held at his house, 32 Soho Square. At a meeting held there on 7 March 1799, the new institution was formed by resolution of the subscribers of 50 guineas each, who became the first Proprietors of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, as it was afterwards named in its Royal Charter.

Frederick Soddy's productive pure research ended with the outbreak of World War I. Before that time Soddy was internationally acknowledged as a great scientist. He had, with Rutherford, produced the atomic disintegration theory and, in association with Ramsay, had proved it experimentally. He had been one of the first men to elucidate the nature of isotopes, and it was he who gave them their name. After the war he was dismissed as a man who had forsaken his science to propound wild theories of monetary reform.

Only weeks following Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne on 20 June 1837, a controversy brewed over the naming of the ‘vegetable wonder’ known today as Victoria amazonica (Sowerby). This gargantuan lily was encountered by the Royal Geographical Society's explorer Robert Schomburgk in British Guyana on New Year's Day, 1837. Following Schomburgk's wishes, metropolitan naturalists sought Victoria's pleasure in naming the flower after her, but the involvement of multiple agents and obfuscation of their actions resulted in two royal names for the lily: Victoria regina (Gray) and Victoria regia (Lindley). To resolve the duplicity in names, the protagonists, John Edward Gray and John Lindley, made priority claims for their respective names, ultimately founding their authorities on conventions aligned with gentlemanly manners and deference to nobility. This article will analyse the controversy, hitherto unexamined by historians, and argue for its significance in repositioning Queen Victoria – and nobility generally – as central agents in the making of authority in early Victorian science.

In the Annual Report of University College London (UCL) for 1946–47 it is stated that ‘the Department of History and Philosophy of Science played a leading part in the formation of the British Society for the History of Science’ and that four members or former members of the department were serving on its Council, one of them as the founder president. A brief account of the early history of the department may therefore be of interest to members of the Society.

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.

For many of those who attended the Charles Lyell Centenary Symposium, one of the high points was the reappearance of Lyell himself (ably impersonated by John Thackray) in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, where some extracts from his London lectures of 1832–3 gave a vivid demonstration of his persuasive rhetoric. These extracts were also felt to illustrate Lyell's characteristic method of geological interpretation and his deeper concerns with the implications of his science, perhaps more clearly than in other published material from the earlier part of his career. At the request of several members of the symposium, I therefore give here a full version of these passages, without the ‘cuts’ and minor alterations that were necessary for the ‘performing script’. The purpose of this paper is simply to make this source-material more accessible, so that it can be used to enrich our understanding of Lyell's approach to geology at this period. I have recently published an account of the circumstances of Lyell's lectures at King's College London in 1832–3 and those at the Royal Institution in 1833, with a summary of their contents, so I shall present these fuller extracts here with the minimum of editorial notes. The two passages chosen are the longest and most continuous of those which Lyell wrote out in full rather than in note form.

There existed between Charles Lyell and Roderick Impey Murchison, the two most prominent British geologists of the mid-nineteenth century, a rivalry that was personal, professional, and theoretical. This rivalry, which was for the most part friendly, was most keenly felt by Murchison, who was always envious of the popular and professional success of Lyell's theories. Although both were born in Scotland and raised in England, where they lived most of their lives, their early lives were considerably different. Murchison's early career as an army officer and fox hunter contrasts rather strongly with Lyell's academic life at Oxford and as a law student. Each was the eldest child of a well-to-do Scottish family. Although Lyell's family was much the wealthier, Murchison personally always had more money than Lyell since Murchison ultimately inherited the estates of his father, father-in-law, and uncle, while Lyell's inheritance waited until his father's death in 1849, at which time the estate was left in trust for the many Lyell children.

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.

When Charles Lyell was writing his Principles of geology early in 1830, he interpolated five chapters between a recently written historical account of the science and the main body of textual material whose structure had long been determined. These added chapters contained not only Lyell's effort ‘to express the consequences of the uniformity of nature in the history of the earth’, but also his general arguments against the catastro-phic-progressionist interpretation, which he felt obliged to refute. In Chapter IX, the final one in the introductory sections, Lyell chose as representative of the progressionist view, Sir Humphry Davy, ‘a late distinguished writer’ who had ‘advanced some of the weightiest of these objections’ to Lyell's own steady-state view of the earth. No other defender of the progressionist history of the earth was named in Lyell's chapter, and we might well ask, why Humphry Davy? Was he merely an easy target for Lyell's refutations, a straw man set up by Lyell for his own rhetorical convenience?

The catalogues of mid-eighteenth-century mathematical instrument makers included not only instruments in the sense ‘tools of science’ but also devices intended primarily for educational use. Among the latter would be found mechanical models of the solar system, in varying degrees of complexity and under various names; for convenience such models may be, and often were, loosely called orreries.

The metamathematical framework of the early modern period is primarily determined by two presuppositions stemming from the Aristotelian tradition: (1) mathematical objects are abstracted from sensible matter; (2) imagination is a reproductive faculty exclusively connected with the sensible realm. The recovery of the works of the Greek commentators confronted the early modern readers with rivalling philosophical–mathematical views that explicitly called into question some of their previously undisputed assumptions. In this article I will argue that Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607) in his Academicae contemplationes brings about an original fusion of these colliding horizons, by transposing the synthesis established by (?)Simplicius between Aristotelian abstractionism and Neoplatonic innatism into the sixteenth century.

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.