Johann Gregor Mendel read his paper, “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden”, to the Naturforschender Verein in Brno, in two parts, the first at the Society's meeting on 8 February 1865, and the second at the next meeting a month later. It was subsequently published in the Society's proceedings for the year 1865 which appeared in print in 1866.

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development.

For sound studies, the publication of a 593-page handbook, not to mention the establishment of at least one society – the European Sound Studies Association – might seem to signify the emergence of a new academic discipline. Certainly, the books under consideration here, alongside many others, testify to an intensification of concern with the aural dimensions of culture. Some of this work comes from HPS and STS, some from musicology and cultural studies. But all of it should concern members of our disciplines, as it represents a long-overdue foregrounding of the aural in how we think about the intersections of science, technology and culture.

In 1839 the working hours of the computers employed on the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich were reduced from eleven hours to eight hours. Previous historians have explained this decrease by reference to the generally benevolent nature of the manager of the reductions, George Biddell Airy. By contrast, this article uses the letters and notes exchanged between Airy and the computers to demonstrate that the change in the working hours originated from the computers as a reaction to their poor working conditions. Through the exploration of these archival materials, the article shifts the focus of the analysis to the working experience of the computers, rather than to the administrative history of the project that inevitably tends to highlight Airy's actions. By doing so, the article shows how the computers were treated as a disposable low-skilled workforce, as opposed to aspiring astronomers with considerable mathematical talent. Through this reframing, the article takes a step towards a working history of the observatory.

In the early nineteenth century, Norwegian mathematician and astronomer Christopher Hansteen (1784–1873) contributed significantly to international collaboration in the study of terrestrial magnetism. In particular, Hansteen was influential in the origin and orientation of the magnetic lobby in Britain, a campaign which resulted in a global network of fixed geomagnetic observatories. In retrospect, however, his contribution was diminished, because his four-pole theory in Untersuchungen der Magnetismus der Erde (1819) was ultimately refuted by Carl Friedrich Gauss in Allgemeine Theorie des Erdmagnetismus (1839). Yet Hansteen's main contribution was practical rather than theoretical. His major impact was related to the circulation of his instruments and techniques. From the mid-1820s, ‘Hansteen's magnetometer’ was distributed all over the British Isles and throughout the international scientific community devoted to studying terrestrial magnetism. Thus in the decades before the magnetic crusade, Hansteen had established an international system of observation, standardization and representation based on measurements with his small and portable magnetometers.

The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (a scrutiny and information-gathering body) and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (a legislative science and technology advice body). Drawing on official papers, Hansard records and unpublished archival material, this account complements existing studies of the relationships between government ministers and experts. It highlights how individual members of the all-party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee have influenced institutional change. In so doing it exposes some of the challenges confronting Parliament in the scrutiny of science policy from the mid-twentieth century to today. In particular, it reveals MPs’ concerns about their ability to scrutinize science policy in the absence of a select committee on science and technology in the Commons during the 1980s. This shows that parliamentary scrutiny of science was compromised during the very period when the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher set about making major changes to the organization and funding of government-sponsored research in the UK.

The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for popularizing the term ‘Anthropozoic’, which he used to describe and characterize the latest ‘era’ of Earth's geological time. His writings, largely unknown to an international audience before the ‘Anthropocene saga’, have been particularly in the spotlight after Valeria Federighi translated excerpts of his main geological work, Corso di Geologia, originally published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873. In the first edition of Corso di Geologia, namely Note ad un Corso Annual di Geologia, or simply Note, published between 1865 and 1870, Stoppani characterized the Anthropozoic in stratigraphic terms. In particular, Chapter 15 of the second volume of Note (1867) represents the first stratigraphic characterization that the author provides of the Anthropozoic. Our contribution here brings, for the first time, a translation of Chapter 15 to a broader international audience, accompanied by a critical commentary elucidating the broader social, political, religious and scientific context wherein the notion of Anthropozoic emerged in Stoppani's writings. The text of the original document and its translation can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000590.