By looking at the fierce debates in the city of Carlsbad in Bohemia around the fabrication of medical salt by a local doctor, David Becher, from 1763 to 1784, the paper examines the interactions between different spheres or levels of circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. The dispute crystallized around the definition of the product, about its medical qualities and its relation with the water of the local mineral spring. The city's inhabitants contested the vision of the medical experts, fearing that the extraction of the medical salt from the spring water and its sale outside the town would have a negative effect on the number of visitors to the spa. Their vision implied a more or less ‘popularized’ form of alchemical thinking as it identified the mineral water with the extracted ‘salt’, conceived as the ‘essence’ of the water, produced by evaporation. The Carlsbad salt dispute highlights the complex interactions among the different networks in which knowledge circulated through the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century. The different actors relied on specific networks with different logics of discourse and different modes of circulation. In each case the relation between the local, the regional and the imperial had to be negotiated. The paper thus sketches out the different geographies of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire but also its localization in and around Carlsbad.

Sharon Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. By Jim Bennett 99

Charles Mollan, William Davis and Brendan Finucane (eds.), Irish Innovators in Science and Technology. By Enda Leaney 100

Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. By Catherine Eagleton, Karin Tybjerg and Koen Vermeir 101

Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. By Christoph Lüthy 103

Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. By Sean M. Quinlan 105

Trevor H. Levere and Gerard L'E. Turner, Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780–1787. By William H Brock 106

Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. By Bowdoin Van Riper 107

David Elliston Allen, Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900. By Jim Endersby 108

Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901. By Richard Noakes 110

Benjamin H. Yandell, The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers. By I. Grattan-Guinness 112

Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. By Neil Pemberton 113

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.

Although largely remembered as an astronomer, the Reverend George Fisher (1794–1873) played a significant part in studying the performance and possible improvement of marine chronometers in the mid-nineteenth century. Appointed astronomer to the Royal Navy's Arctic expedition of 1818, while on the voyage Fisher carried out research into the effects of magnetism on the accurate running of chronometers on board ship. By this time, chronometers were standard equipment on many ships and their reliability was a matter of importance to all mariners. Fisher's published findings from this research led to considerable contemporary debate, and also influenced the work of others in the field. Moreover, as papers held at the National Maritime Museum show, he carried on his chronometer research in later life, making further contributions to the subject that have remained somewhat neglected.

The outstanding scientific work of Christopher Kelk Ingold (1893–1970) was the focus of considerable discussion, celebration and evaluation during the year of the centenary of his birth. In addition to understanding his prolific and highly original scientific output as a pioneer in the application of physical methods to organic chemistry and, indeed, as a founder of physical organic chemistry, it is also important to examine other aspects of Ingold's career, in particular his role in shaping the institutional context in which he developed his work. From 1930 until his death, Ingold was attached to a major international centre, the Chemistry Department of University College London. From 1937 to 1961, as its Head and Director of Laboratories, continuing the policies of his predecessor on chemical education and the organization of research, he developed a very distinctive chemistry department.

By an ancient and honourable tradition, which began last year when I spared you this exercise, the President gives a Presidential Address only once during his term of office, on retirement. A presidential address in the summer season is a privileged occasion. Coming at the end of an active day, it is not the moment for a massive account of research. Rather it is an occasion when one may indulge with privilege in some directed impressionism, and that is what I propose to do.

The store of scientific knowledge is a general treasure-house from which all men may draw. And yet – perhaps because of the wide spread of scientific ideas – we seldom remind ourselves that the development of the stock of scientific ideas, the heritage of all men, has always been the work of a very small band. Men capable of great scientific effort are rare and, for their effectual working, an intellectual environment is needed that is well nigh as rare as themselves. Surely the contemplation of the conditions under which such men have laboured and lived, the examination of their training and mental history, of their ways of life, and of the human setting must be of some value to those who would follow in their footsteps or prepare others to do so. Nor is the reverse side of the picture without its lesson. The study of those social, economic and philosophical conditions that fail to produce effective scientific fruits, or that yield only bizarre or deformed products, can at least explain for us certain phases in the mental history of mankind. Thus the study of the scientific mood in its historical development needs little justification.

The development of geology during the first half of the nineteenth century is now considered to be more complicated than was once thought. The positivistic picture of two conflicting schools, one of them allegedly modern and progressive, the other supposedly conservative and scriptural, is too simplistic and misleading. First, the influence of the Bible has been exaggerated. It is true that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Flood had been given an important role as a geological agent, but in the early nineteenth century there were hardly any professional geologists who defended this view. At least, it is not correct to associate either neptunism, catastrophism, or diluvialism with the Mosaic tradition. Secondly, the use of such terms as ‘catastrophism’ and ‘diluvialism’ has been unfortunate in so far as they have led to biblical associations; these terms must be given a more precise meaning. Thirdly, in the evaluation of the geology of the period, not enough weight has been given to the historical context. From our knowledge of modern geology alone it is not possible to judge what was loose speculation or empirical science at that time. Lyell's contributions to geology, as well as those of his opponents, should be considered and examined in more detail.

The Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the post-war nuclear arms race with fission and fusion bombs have been the subject of many discussions and historical studies. In fact, these subjects, and the way in which they were generally dealt with, have led to retrospective distortion with respect to the spectrum of ‘atomic’ weapons discussed and explored during the wartime Manhattan Project and immediately after the Second World War. Specifically, it has made observers of the cold war's early nuclear arms race overlook the fact that the military use of radioactive reactor fission products in so-called radiological warfare weapons, was a very real possibility at the time, both for the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the military, as well as for relative outsiders and the general public. Thus, for many observers it came as something of a surprise when the United States in 1976 introduced radiological weapons as an issue of UN arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

A quotation from J. T. Desaguliers, one of the foremost scientific lecturers in England until his death in 1744, contrasts the use of demonstrations to show physical principles and those designed to imitate real situations:

I have indeed a Machine with brass wheels whose steel axes have very small pivots nicely made that any of the wheels set in motion will turn for the space of more than half an hour… but the use of my machine being chiefly to show how near these kinds of experiments may be brought to agree with a mathematical theory; we cannot expect that any carriage to bear weight can have so little friction. Therefore I choose to relate Monsieur De Camus's Experiments made on Models of Carriages of an inch to a Foot every way representing Carts and Waggons… because it shows us directly what is the real Friction in the carriages at present in use.

Joseph Glanvill is well known for his enthusiastic support of the early Royal Society. Even before Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London (1667) appeared in full, Glanvill had set a philosophic background for the new science in his Vanity of dogmatizing (1661), had attacked the outdatedness of contemporary Aristotelians in a revised edition of Vanity called Scepsis scientifica (1665), had praised the Society at length in a flowery address in Scepsis, and had defended the programme of the Society in his private correspondence. If propaganda and enthusiastic support were needed for the growth of science in Restoration England, no one seems to have done more to supply these ingredients during the early years of the Royal Society's existence than the colourful rector of Bath and Frome.

The development of systematic mathematics requires writing, and hence a non-literate culture cannot be expected to advance mathematics beyond the stage of numeral words and counting. The hundreds of languages of the Australian aborigines do not seem to have included any extensive numeral systems. However, the common assertions to the effect that ‘Aborigines have only one, two, many’ derive mostly from reports by nineteenth century Christian missionaries, who commonly understood less mathematics than did the people on whom they were reporting. Of course, in recent decades almost all Aborigines have been involved with the dominant European-style culture of Australia, and even those who are not literate have mostly learned to use English-style numerals and to handle money. Similar qualifications should be understood when speaking of any recent primitive culture.