William Cullen, lecturer in chemistry at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, spent many years formulating his own theory of heat and combustion, the most developed version of which appears in a little-known set of lecture notes of 1765. Cullen's theory is of particular interest to historians of chemistry as an example of his ideal of ‘philosophical chemistry’, an autonomous branch of natural philosophy distinct from the mechanical philosophy, with its own general laws and explanations of phenomena justified by observation. The theory assimilated Joseph Black's recent discovery of fixed air as well as Cullen's investigations of the generation of heat in chemical operations. It was formulated just one year before British chemists' sudden identification of new ‘airs’ was dramatically to change the field of phlogiston theory. The theory differs in important ways from any version yet discussed. It successfully brought both heat and elective attraction within its explanatory domain. It set out a causal hierarchy which reversed the usual pattern evinced in earlier sets of lecture notes, subordinating the mechanical to the chemical in the form of Cullen's theory of elective attraction. The paper argues that Cullen was attempting to bring the study of heat as well as combustion within the bounds of his ‘philosophical chemistry’ by means of his single unifying theory.

This paper retraces the occurrence of the word ‘organism’ in writings of different authors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It seeks to clarify chronological and conceptual shifts in the usage and meaning of the word. After earlier uses of the word in medieval sources, the Latin word organismus appeared in 1684 in Stahl's medico-physiological writings. Around 1700 it can be found in French (organisme), English (organism), Italian (organismo) and later also in German (Organismus). During the eighteenth century the word ‘organism’ generally referred to a specific principle or form of order that could be applied to plants, animals or the entire world. At the end of the eighteenth century the term became a generic name for individual living entities. From around 1830 the word ‘organism’ replaced the expressions ‘organic’ or ‘organized body’ as a recurrent technical term in the emerging biological disciplines.

The bulk of this address concerns itself with the extent to which professional scientists were involved in popular science writing in early twentieth-century Britain. Contrary to a widespread assumption, it is argued that a significant proportion of the scientific community engaged in writing the more educational type of popular science. Some high-profile figures acquired enough skill in popular writing to exert considerable influence over the public's perception of science and its significance. The address also shows how publishers actively sought ‘expert’ authors for popular material, but at the same time controlled what was published in accordance with their perception of what would sell. At a more popular level of writing there were many semi-professional authors who, while not active scientists, exploited close contacts with the scientific community. Here there was a strong emphasis on the practical applications of science.

The address concludes by suggesting parallels between popular science writing in this period and the present state of popular writing about the history of science.

After a brief account of the uncertainty of medicine in early modern thought, this paper focuses on two supple, sophisticated accounts of medicine by ‘non-medical’ writers – Michel de Montaigne's views of medical theory and medical practice and Francis Bacon's proposals for renovating both – in which the claims of individual sufferers are set against the normativity of medicine as a whole. From around 1500 to around 1680, in the common ensemble of both learned and popular invective, medicine was disparaged as poor philosophy and worse practice, even as the ‘lowest of professions’. In remarkably broad, elegant interventions, Montaigne argues that medicine is based on ‘examples and experience’ (and ‘so is my opinion’, he adds), impugning its universalizing claims with the tractable experience of his own embodiment, with his own historia and consilium, while Francis Bacon enlists dietetics, Hippocratic case-taking and medical history in his broad programme for the reform of medicine. He more or less accepts Montaigne's argument for particularity in medical theory and practice, but presses the particular into service in his reformist programme. Like many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholars and physicians frustrated with Galenic methods and models, both turn to Hippocratic practice and to hygiene and dietetics as salves for an ailing discipline. Finally, I argue that both writers enquire into viable means for inflecting learned medicine with particular experience, and both settle on rhetorical tools – analogy and exemplarity – as the means by which universalized medical models might be particularized or reformed.

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

A purportedly hermaphrodite monkey which was offered to Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Tuscany in 1791 was sent to the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History for an evaluation. In their investigation, the museum's naturalists encountered a fundamental classificatory problem which made it impossible to decide whether the animal was monstrous or normal – a ‘taxonomist's regress’ which constitutes a special case of finitism as analysed in the Edinburgh school's readings of Wittgenstein. The communication between museum and court shows that in resolving this ambiguity, museum naturalist Giovanni Fabbroni demarcated experts from laypeople and defined state interest by distinguishing between the grand duke's private interests and those of the state. This case thus highlights the role of late Enlightenment absolutism for the creation of modern practices and concepts of expertise in the service of the state.

Irish mechanics' institutes have received little attention from historians of science, but their history presents intriguing questions. Whereas industrialization, Protestant dissent and the politics of liberal social reformers have been identified as crucial for the development of mechanics' institutes in Britain, their influence in Ireland was regionally limited. Nonetheless, many unindustrialized, provincial, largely Catholic Irish towns had mechanics' institutes in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper investigates the history of the two mechanics' institutes of Galway, founded in 1826 and 1840, and analyses how local and national contexts affected the establishment, function and development of a provincial Irish mechanics' institute. Situating these institutes within the changing social and political constellations of early and mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, it shows how Catholic emancipation, the temperance movement and different strands of Irish nationalism affected approaches to the uses of science and science education in Ireland.

The forma fluens/fluxus formae debate concerns the question as to whether motion is something distinct from the body in motion, the flow of a distinct form identified with motion (fluxus formae), or nothing more than the successive states of the body in motion, the flow of some form found in one of Aristotle's ten categories (forma fluens). Although Albertus Magnus introduced this debate to the Latin West he drew his inspiration from Avicenna. This study argues that Albertus misclassified Avicenna's position, since Albertus could not conceptualize motion at an instant, whereas it is claimed here this was the very position Avicenna adopted. The paper includes an overview of Albertus's discussion and a brief survey of the Avicennan sources upon which Albertus drew. The heart of the paper treats Avicenna's analysis of motion at an instant. Avicenna's general argument was that since spatial points have no extremities, nothing in principle prevents a moving object from being at a spatial point for more than an instant, understood as a limit. It is then argued that Avicenna had the philosophical machinery to make sense of a limit, albeit not in mathematical terms, but in terms of an Aristotelian potential infinite.

One of the most fascinating experiences gained by the meteorological observers of the Correspondentie Sociëteit concerned the practical use of new instruments. In the period after 1775 renewed interest in meteorology had stimulated the development of various new meteorological instruments. These instruments seemed at first to be a welcome addition or improvement in quantitative meteorology. How did the Correspondentie Sociëteit cope with these new developments? What factors determined whether or not the instruments were accepted as a useful addition to instruments already available? Four examples will be used to illustrate how this issue was tackled.

The frequent distinction made between scientific and purely amateur collections misrepresents the specificity of the field of eighteenth-century natural history. This paper argues that the extent and the boundaries of a scientific field can be determined only within the framework of concrete historical constellations of institutions, protagonists, practices and objects. By tracing the circulation of shells in eighteenth-century France, Paris in particular, between about 1735 and 1780, it becomes evident which individuals or groups actually came into contact with these shells; in what practices of collecting, describing and classification they were involved; and in what spaces they were displayed. Thus the contours of a constellation emerge which differ considerably from those drawn hitherto.

Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) is now remembered as an approximation of the anthropological method that would soon be conventional: a comprehensive study of a delimited area, based on sustained fieldwork, portraying a population's distinctive character. In 1913, however, Bronislaw Malinowski said of Spencer and Gillen's studies that ‘half the total production in anthropological theory ha[d] been based upon their work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it’. Native Tribes inspired an intense international debate, orchestrated by J. G. Frazer, broker of the book's publication, predicated on the assumption that indigenous Australians were the most primitive of living peoples, whose totemism was somehow at the base of civilization's highest achievements – monogamous marriage and truly spiritual religion. But the debate proved irresolvable in Frazer's terms. Pondering conflicting interpretations of totemism, anthropologists rejected unilinear models of social evolution like Frazer's. Nationally differentiated populations of professional anthropologists emerged in the early twentieth century, developing distinctive theoretical schemes. Nevertheless, some issues central to the debate remained vital. For example, how were magical, scientific and religious modes of thought and action to be distinguished? And in Australia, analyses of indigenes were distinctively construed. White settlers, concerned to legitimate colonial rule, asked specific questions: did Aborigines have established ties to specific lands? Were Aborigines capable of civilization? Biogeographical theory underpinned Spencer's relatively liberal conclusions, which had precursors and successors in Australian anthropology: Aborigines had defined criteria of land ownership, their habits were suitable adaptations to their circumstances, and observed cultural diversity among Aborigines denoted their ‘nascent possibilities of development along many varied lines’.

Freemasonry was the most widespread form of secular association in eighteenth-century England, providing a model for other forms of urban sociability and a stimulus to music and the arts. Many members of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, for instance, were Freemasons, while historians such as Margaret Jacob have argued that Freemasonry was inspired by Whig Newtonianism and played an important role in European Enlightenment scientific education. This paper illustrates the importance of natural philosophy in Masonic rhetoric and utilizes material from Masonic histories, lodge records and secondary works to demonstrate that scientific lectures were indeed given in some lodges. It contends, however, that there were other sources of inspiration for Freemasonry besides Newtonianism, such as antiquarianism, and that many other factors as well as the prevalence of Masonic lodges determined the geography of English scientific culture. Although the subject of Freemasonry and natural philosophy has great potential, as Jacob has demonstrated so well, much further work, especially in the form of prosopographical studies of provincial lodges, is required before the nature of the relationship between the two can be fully appreciated.

This paper examines the activities of the Alsatian physicist–engineer and philosopher Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, whose contribution to thermodynamics and the metaphysical interpretation of heat theory are rather neglected parts of the history of French thermodynamics. The industrial environment in which Hirn was reared, and in which he worked, turned his thoughts to an investigation of thermal phenomena in conjunction with their relevance to the industrial needs of his factory. Nurtured in the intellectual environment of Colmar, Hirn also developed a deep sense of morality that was bound to the Christian world view. His work on heat led him to a generalized metaphysics based on the notion of force. However, despite important work on friction and his ‘independent’ discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat, Hirn never felt that his work received its due recognition from his contemporaries. Without attributing this negligence solely to Hirn's relative isolation in Alsace and to the absence of formal institutional affiliations, the paper suggests that it was Hirn's particular scientific practice that was at odds with well-established practices employed by other French scientists and engineers.

This article compares investigations of the process of vision that were made in early nineteenth-century Britain and the German lands. It is argued that vision studies differed significantly east and west of the North Sea. Most of the German investigators had a medical background and many of them had a firm grasp of contemporary philosophy. In contrast, the British studies on vision emerged from the context of optics. This difference manifested itself in the conceptual tools for the analysis of vision, deception and illusion and shaped the experiments on visual phenomena that were carried out. Nevertheless, both in Britain and in the German lands vision studies were driven by the same impetus, by epistemological concerns with the nature and reliability of knowledge acquisition in experience. The general epistemological conclusions drawn from researches on vision and deception were optimistic. Precisely because mechanisms of deception and illusion could be uncovered, the possibility of acquiring empirical knowledge could be secured.

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.

The Isotope School was established in 1951 by the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell following the model of the American Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. Until its dissolution in 1967, it played an important role in the expansion of radioisotope techniques in Britain and Western Europe. This paper traces the origin and activities of the Isotope School, and describes the content of its courses and the composition of its audiences both in Britain and abroad. These illustrate the motivations behind the early diffusion of nuclear technology and the importance of Cold War politics in shaping the flows of materials and expertise. In particular, the ban on attendance of Eastern European students at the courses reveals a persistent tension inside the British nuclear programme: the conflict between the drive for disseminating nucleonics and the restrictions forced by national security concerns.

This paper examines the development of a quantified, standardized and institutionalized meteorological science in nineteenth-century Britain, one that relied on sophisticated instrumentation and highly regulated observers and techniques of observation in its attempt to produce an accurate picture of the national weather. The story is told from one of the numerous points in British meteorology's extensive collection network: from Cornwall, in the far southwest of England. Although the county had been an acknowledged centre of meteorological labour since the eighteenth century, it came increasingly under the influence of various London-based meteorological institutions in the 1830s and in 1868 was chosen as the site of one of the Royal Society of London's few prestigious ‘first-order’ meteorological observatories. This case study presents us with the opportunity to witness the ways in which a national scientific enterprise was assimilated and interpreted in a particular local context. It gives us a chance to see how regulated forms of instrumentation and quantified measurement were translated in a particular place and, of course, how the non-place-bound ideals of metropolitan science occasionally faltered in the face of local values and preoccupations.

The case of Indian meteorite collections shows how, during the production of science, knowledge-making institutions such as museums were sometimes strongly linked with coercive institutions such as the police. If geological collecting in India in the Company period was mainly geared towards satisfying the demands of metropolitan science, the period after the 1850s saw a dramatic shift in the nature of collecting and the practice of colonial science, with the emergence of public museums in India. These colonial museums, represented by the Indian Museum, Calcutta, began to compete with the British Museum for the possession of locally formed collections in an effort to form an exemplary ‘Indian’ scientific collection. This resulted in conflicts which changed the very nature of colonial science. This paper shows how the 1860s marked a break with the past. A new breed of colonial scientist arrived, prepared successfully to challenge the status of the British Museum as the ‘centre of all sciences’ and to defend scientific institutions in the land of their practice, the colony. Rather than being driven by a feeling of scientific dependence or independence, or even the patriotic aspiration to build a national collection in London, it was scientific internationalism backed by the strength of local knowledge that now determined their practice.

This article assesses the reputation of Mary Somerville in the 1830s and suggests that critical confusion over her status in the changing world of early nineteenth-century science is not new. Drawing on Somerville’s own writings, contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews, political debates and unpublished manuscripts, Somerville's ‘uniqueness’ as a public figure is examined through the eyes of both the nascent scientific community of the time as well as the wider audience for her work. Somerville's status as a popularizer and an educator is more complicated than may have previously been assumed and can be both confirmed and undermined by an analysis of contemporary public opinion. Although her works were directed at the public who indirectly paid her pension for services to science, Somerville's private and published comments about and within her writings offer an alternative interpretation. Despite an apparent turn to more popular works in order to bolster her finances, Mary Somerville relished the specialist aspect of her writings and valued the difficulties which prevented the ordinary reader from obtaining ultimate insight into celestial mechanics.