The attempt to narrow the general discourse of the problem of error and to focus it on the specific problem of experimental error may be approached from different directions. One possibility is to establish a focusing process from the standpoint of history; such an approach requires a careful scrutiny of the history of science with a view to identifying the juncture when the problem of experimental error was properly understood and accounted for. In a study of this kind one would have to examine the evolution of the method of experimentation and related topics so that clear criteria would underlie the analysis.

Wallace became a full-time naturalist in 1848, the year when he and Bates set out on their journey to South America. Wallace was twenty-five at the time and over half of his life had been spent in various parts of Wales, the land of his birth. Commentators have tended to gloss over or ignore any formative influences from this early period of his life or even to dismiss them as non-existent. This is surprising as it was during the eight or so years in Wales leading up to 1848 that Wallace's interest in natural history emerged. ‘The importance of this early period in Wallace's life can scarcely be over-emphasized’ wrote Durant in his account of the development of the Wallace personality, but he omitted any specific reference to the significance of the early period in Wales. Those seeking a simple unitary cause for Wallace's conversion to natural history usually locate this in his visit to Leicester in 1844 and his meeting there with H. W. Bates. ‘The odyssey began … in 1844, in Leicester’ wrote Brooks, adding that ‘the more remote parts of … southern Wales had offered little reading material…’ This, and similar claims, are presumably founded primarily on Wallace's belief—expressed sixty years later—that it was at Leicester that he first familiarized himself with Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population and Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels in South America. There is, however, evidence that Wallace was probably familiar with at least one of these books some time before his visit to Leicester and that it was during his period in southern Wales that his interest in natural history emerged and developed.

It has long been recognized that unnecessary cruelty to animals was held to be morally wrong by many classical moralists and medieval scholastics, and was echoed repeatedly in the early-modern period, though not necessarily reflecting any particular concern for animals, but rather to indicate the supposed brutalizing effects on the human character. The prevalence of the more radical view that cruelty to animals was wrong regardless of human consequences has only been dealt with comparatively recently, in the pioneering work of Keith Thomas with regard to early-modern England. Thomas suggested that a remarkably constant and coherent argument underpinned the bulk of pamphleteering and preaching against animal cruelty in the period; man was entitled to domesticate animals and kill them for food and clothing but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. While wild animals could be killed for food or in self-defence, and game and vermin could be hunted, it was deemed wrong to kill only for pleasure. While this position could be found among Protestants of many different persuasions, the particular focus of successive campaigners changed over time. Preceding the Civil War the attack was concentrated on cock-fighting, bear-baiting and the ill-treatment of domestic animals; in the later seventeenth century it broadened out to include the caging of wild birds, brutal methods of slaughter, hare-hunting and vivisection.

Bernard Norton's friends in the history of science have had many reasons for commemorating, with admiration and affection, not only his research and teaching but no less his conversation and his company. One of his most estimable traits was his refusal to beat about the bush in raising the questions he thought worthwhile pursuing. I still remember discoursing at Pittsburgh on Darwin's route to his theory of natural selection, and being asked at the end by Bernard what were Darwin's views on heredity. I answered with the conventional waffle to the effect that the theory concerned the populational fate rather than the individual production and transmission of heritable variation, so that whatever views Darwin had on heredity had only a subsidiary place in his theorizing. Bernard was not fooled. ‘I would have thought’, he said, ‘that in order to understand anyone's theorising about evolution it would be necessary to look at his views on heredity’.

Published texts, unpublished documents and, to a lesser extent, artefacts are the stuff from which historians of science fashion their interpretations of the past. From these residues we attempt to reconstruct the lost fabric of personalities, activities and institutions that constituted the practice of science, and to comprehend the flow of thought that was its substance. Like the sensory data of the empirical sciences, these raw materials are not pure chunks of reality. They must be interpreted in the light of contemporary discourse and practice of which they were part. Over time, and in the hands of different commentators they acquire new significance, sometimes of mythic proportions; moreover, they are inevitably viewed in the light of present suppositions and fashions, both scientific and historiographical.

Bernard Norton's research concentrated on the Biometrical school of Darwinism and the social implications of the hereditarian ideas that began to gain popularity in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In this article I want to look at the previous generation of evolutionists, the evolutionary morphologists against whom the Biometricians (and their great rivals, the early Mendelians) were reacting. Despite the prominence of evolutionary morphology in the post-Darwinian era, comparatively little historical work has been done on it. In helping to fill this gap, I hope to honour Bernard Norton's memory by throwing light on a movement that forms a conceptual bridge linking the original Darwinian debate to the Biometrical – Mendelian controversy. I shall also argue that evolutionary morphology had ideological overtones that helped to shape the cultural environment within which the eugenics movement would emerge. Although originally a product of the Victorian faith in progress, evolutionary morphology seemed to confirm that exposure to an unstimulating environment led to degeneration. It thus fuelled the concern over racial degeneration which the supporters of eugenics would seek to allay through the application of their new hereditarian philosophy.

As sociologists learn more about how scientific knowledge is created, they give historians the opportunity to rework their accounts from a more contextual perspective. It is relatively easy to do so in areas with large theoretical, cosmological or overtly ideological components. It is more difficult, but equally necessary, to open up very empirical accomplishments, and recent sociological analysis of the process of science gives us some interesting insights. This paper employs some of these on the apparently unpromising subject of the ‘discovery of secular magnetic variation’ in 1634 by the Gresham professor Henry Gellibrand.

‘Hitherto want of accuracy and definiteness have often been brought as a charge against geology, and sometimes only with too much justice’, wrote Archibald Geikie in a review of Sir Roderick Murchison's Siluria (1867). ‘We seem now to be entering, however, upon a new era, when there will be infused into geological methods and speculation, some of the precision of the exact sciences’. Geikie's judgement echoed an appeal made some thirty years earlier by William Hopkins (1793–1866) that the science of geology needed to be ‘elevated’ from a level of ‘indeterminate generalities’ to a rank among the stricter physical sciences. This paper aims to analyse, in the context of broader trends favouring measurement and mathematics in British scientific practice, Hopkins' role in the promotion of dynamical geology as a major new complement to stratigraphical geology such that, for example, in the first edition of Geikie's Textbook of Geology (1882) the dynamical and stratigraphical components each filled 376 pages.

The increasing attention which has been given to social history of science and to the sociological analysis of scientific activity has resulted in a renewed interest in scientific controversies. Furthermore, the rejection of the presentist view of history, according to which those contestants who took what we can identify, with the benefit of modern knowledge, as the ‘right’ stand in a controversy, were right and their opponents were ‘wrong’, left the subject of scientific controversies with many questions. What determines their emergence, course and resolution? When Froggatt and Nevin wrote on the Bio-metric-Mendelian controversy in 1971 they called their article ‘descriptive rather than interpretative’, so they avoided the very questions we would like to ask. Provine, in the same year, concentrated on the strong personalities of the contestants, their clashes, and the scientific arguments in play. But in 1975 Mackenzie and Barnes argued that the controversy could not be accounted for unless recourse was had to sociological factors. Their view has become widely known and figured prominently in 1982 in Steven Shapin's recital of the empirical achievements of the application of the sociological approach. I have returned to this subject because I do not yet feel altogether convinced by Mackenzie and Barnes' analysis. Even if their analysis of the controversy between Pearson and Bateson be accepted, it is not so obvious how effectively it can be used to explain the controversy between Weldon and Bateson, and I am not confident that it is adequate for an understanding of the evolution of their differing views of the mechanism of evolution.

Darwin is well known for his wondrously ambiguous rhetoric. The author who used an ‘entangled bank’ as his metaphor for Nature and its complex relationships built up the substance of his text from a corresponding entanglement of unresolved theoretical relations. Ambiguous positions, arguments that seem to fold in on themselves, vacillations, contradictions, and pluralities of explanation suffuse Darwin's science and its constituent metascience. The Origin abounds in ambiguities with regard to the technical features of evolutionary biology. But the domain of ambiguity I wish to address is Darwin's metaphysical stance. I want to approach the question of Darwin and secularization through what might be called the trope of ambiguity. My principle concern is with the origins of that ambiguity. These lie in the conflicting cultural and ideological resources Darwin used to construct the theory of natural selection.

The Century between the death of Copernicus (1543) and the birth of Newton (1642) witnessed a major reshaping of traditional ways of viewing the universe. The Ptolemaic system was challenged by Copernican heliocentrism, the Aristotelian world was assailed by Galilean physics and revived atomism, and theology was troubled by the progressive distancing of God from the daily operation of His creation. Besides earning this era the title of ‘the Scientific Revolution’, the intellectual ferment of these times offered many world systems as successors to the throne of crumbling Aristotelianism.

The renowned notebook of the twelfth-century architect Villard de Honnecourt contains some deleted diagrams, which have been studied by Roland Bechmann. An infra-red photograph of a page revealing an erased drawing of a pointed arch is reproduced as Fig. 25, a redrawn diagram is given as Fig. 26 and an enhanced version (with supplementary constructions) is given as Fig. 27. That enhanced version includes a simple geometrical construction of a line AE, with the radius of each of the semi-circles labelled as R.

A review of J.V. Field, Kepler's Geometrical Cosmology, published in March 1989 p. 124, inadvertently gave the bibliographic information for the North American publisher whilst omitting that for the British publisher, who supplied the review copy. Outside North America the book is published by Athlone of London, ISBN 0–485–11284–1.

William Hampson, classics graduate and barrister, burst into science with his patent for air-liquefaction in 1895. Its success provided the means of isolating the rarer permanent atmospheric gases, and it formed the basis for multi-tonnage gas liquefaction. The British Oxygen Company acquired Hampson's patent interests.

The history of eugenics has become a classic arena for examining how the interplay of culture, social interests and social structures affects the advancement of science. At the same time eugenics demonstrates how in the first half of the twentieth century, the expectation arose that science could offer the solution of social problems; for biology intruded into many areas of social policy during the 1920s and 30s. Historians of science have been struck by the coincidence between the rise of genetics and eugenics after 1900. Genetics underpinned techniques of family reconstruction, which were deployed for the screening of population groups. Areas of social policy such as the prediction of potential criminals and other types of social deviancy relied on eugenic rationales. This poses intriguing problems concerning the extent to which genetic research was motivated by eugenic ideals, particularly in the field of human genetics. At the same time, it is important to recognize that eugenics was a heterogenous agglomeration of sciences: in addition to genetics, a prominent place was taken by anthropology, clinical medicine, statistics, and psychology. These diverse constituents were welded together by cultural and social movements peculiar to respective national contexts.