There is a story, which historians of modern France often tell, of the ministerial official in Paris who had only to glance at his clock in order to know the exact passage of Vergil being construed and the law of physics being expounded in every school throughout the country. Invariably, the story is told for a purpose. It is used to demonstrate the high degree of centralization and the attendant rigidity of the French educational system, usually with special reference to the nineteenth century. The story, which has its roots in the rich corpus of Napoleonic legend, serves this purpose very well, but unfortunately it is both apocryphal and misleading. For while it is true that most nineteenth-century ministers with responsibility for education aspired to the ideal of total control, not one of them came close to it in reality.

Classical thermochemistry is inextricably bound up with the problem of chemical affinity. In 1851, when Julius Thomsen began his career in thermochemistry, the concept of chemical affinity had been in the centre of chemical enquiry for more than a century. In spite of many suggestions, preferably to explain affinity in terms of electrical or gravitational forces, almost nothing was known about the cause and nature of affinity. In this state of puzzling uncertainty some chemists felt it more advantageous to establish an adequate experimental measure of affinity, whatever its nature was. One way of providing affinity with a quantitative description was by means of the heats evolved in chemical processes.

Much has been made of Plato's influence of medieval minds, yet as Raymond Klibansky reminds us, much remains to be learned. The twelfth-century Platonist writings are notably various: Brian Stock and Winthrop Weatherbee have examined the effect of Platonic tradition on twelfth-century poetry and Tullio Gregory and Richard Lemay have added to our understanding of its effect on philosophical and theoretical thought in this period. The rich accretions of Hermetic and astrological material have been studied along with the older Plotinian interpretations and the whole complicated orchestration of these various themes has received minute attention. Moreover, in this diversity of Platonic writings, a strongly imaginative quality is often present. Indeed, as Peter Dronke says,

They are achievements not only of the rational intellect but of the active imagination. Their cosmological insights are nourished by imaginative springs as much as by the disciplined sources of abstract thinking. Theirs is a realm where sacred visions and profane myth can combine with analytic thought, poetic fantasy with physical and metaphysical speculation. In terms of scholarship it is a realm which, because it is at the borders of several genres, is still in many ways a neglected one.

During the nineteenth century an intellectual elite formed in Germany which owed its status primarily to educational qualifications rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. With the ascendency of this elite, which Fritz Ringer has called the German ‘mandarins’, came their acceptance as the spiritual bearers of culture in German life. Politically they controlled the life of the Reichstag and hence were the spokesmen of the nation. As an intellectual elite they fed a diet of German idealistic philosophy to the educational class. The university professors, as the most influential members of this class, spoke for the mandarin elite as a whole; and most cultivated Germans looked to the academicians for their understanding of political and cultural issues. Hence, German academic opinion became a sort of ‘mandarin ideology’.

Au XVIIIème siècle, bien des penseurs et savants du continent s'étaient engoués de l'Angleterre. Elle avait été un foyer de grands ébranlements, autant dans l'ordre politico-social—c'est le pays révolutionnaire de Cromwell et c'est là que fut mis au point la monarchie constitutionnelle—que dans l'ordre scientifique et technique—ce pays est le berceau de la science newtonienne et celui d'une industrie pleine de vitalité. Aussi, bien des discussions savantes et passionnées ont été nourries de références aux modèles anglais. Les échos s'en répercutent jusqu'au XIXème siècle.

Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal was not only a chemical manufacturer and one of the first ‘industrial scientists’ but was also, according to his own testimony, one of the early supporters of Lavoisier's system of chemistry. It might be assumed that Chaptal's pioneering work in industrial chemistry was intimately linked with his acceptance of the oxygen system of chemistry; more specifically, that this theory served to direct and inform his applied research and contributed not a little to its success. Indeed, he himself in 1790 explicitly stated this to have been the case. A close study of his work prior to 1790 fails, however, to establish the importance of such a linkage. First, his selection of research topics proves to have owed little to the ‘new chemistry’ but much to the scientific and economic milieu of his province of Languedoc and of Montpellier, its administrative seat. Second, the significance of his acceptance of the ‘new chemistry’ appears rather problematic, not the least because of the rather hazy boundaries between the phlogistic and Lavoisian theories in the 1780s. Third, it is not clear from the evidence available how the new theory helped solve the various problems of industrial chemistry he faced, or could have done so, other than to offer alternative explanations for processes with which he was already familiar and indeed had often mastered. It will be suggested that it is precisely this less dramatic role which was filled by the new chemistry: that of ‘rectifying’ his ideas by providing alternative and more satisfactory rationalizations of his experiences and experiments in the laboratory and the factory, not that of enabling him to simplify and perfect old processes nor to invent new ones. To put the point more bluntly: Chaptal's early successes and reputation in industrial chemistry were not a by-product of his allegiance to the new chemistry; rather, his growing adherence to that system was a by-product of its ability to provide satisfactory post-hoc explanations of the chemical processes and products with which he was concerned.

In 1837 the German-born astronomer F. G. W. Struve published his famous catalogue of double stars. For Struve this was the culmination of 12 years' detailed observation of a class of celestial objects lying exclusively beyond the solar system; for historians of astronomy it poses the problem of explaining why the study of double stars became a significant part of astronomical endeavour, as it did, during the 1820s and 1830s. For, although Struve's interest was extreme, it was shared to a lesser extent by several eminent contemporaries, including John Herschel, Friedrich Bessel, Johann Encke, James South and Félix Savary. Their combined efforts represented an important transition in astronomy: for the first time one of the emphases of the subject moved beyond the solar system to the so-called fixed stars. The question of the emergence of interest in double stars is of historical significance, therefore, as it is related to the problem of the origins of ‘stellar astronomy’. This essay is thus intended to offer an explanation of astronomers' interest in double stars, and to tackle the related question of whether this transition constituted a major break in the history of astronomy. Furthermore it is proposed that answers to these problems may be found by considering the practice of astronomy dominant during the first half of the nineteenth century. Astronomers in this period were overwhelmingly concerned with a refined form of positional astronomy. The problems they chose to solve were by and large related to the difficulties of the accurate reduction of observational data, and the compilation of reliable tables and star charts, which were then used as a background against which the motions of solar system objects were plotted. By assessing individuals' studies of double stars within this context it can be seen firstly that such studies were no more or less than specific examples of a general case, and secondly that the stars themselves were not usually of intrinsic interest. In general it was the positions of the stars on the

The career of Thomas Beddoes was moulded by British responses to the French Revolution. Beddoes, until appalled by the events of the Terror, saw France as the model for mankind. The government of England took the very different view that democracy was closely allied with jacobinism and sedition. The Home Office was the agency most immediately engaged in opposing sedition, and any criticism of the King, or of the constitution in church and state, was scrutinized as being potentially seditious. In 1793, England and France went to war, and the following years saw treason trials and gagging bills, profoundly disturbing even to the more conservative among the friends of peace and liberty in England, Beddoes among them.

Since its foundation in 1799, the Royal Institution of Great Britain has attracted talent and witnessed memorable events in science. The records of many of these events, as well as of the day to day institutional happenings have been preserved. The archives, manuscripts comprising note books, papers and correspondence, as well as the pictorial records, the scientific apparatus and the personal relics of the people who have worked and lived here together with an extensive library all provide a valuable resource for the historian of science.

There existed essentially two theories of light during the early nineteenth century: the particulate theory and the wave theory. This we realise today is a gross over-simplification, since there were many varieties of each theory. But to the supporters of one theory the other theory had faults so fundamental that no distinction between varieties of the same theory was sufficient to placate opposition to that theory. This meant that opponents of either the wave or the particulate theory seldom, in their attacks, distinguished between different varieties of either theory.

Samuel Lytler Metcalfe (1798–1856) was an American chemist and physician who wrote a voluminous work, Caloric Its Mechanical Chemical and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature (2 vols., London, 1843); attempting to account for all natural phenomena in terms of caloric. The book came out at the time when the concept of caloric was being gradually discarded and the law of conservation of energy was about to appear. Metcalfe was convinced that caloric would be the key to unlock the secrets of nature; in order to develop the practical implications of his views he made research trips twice to England (1831 and 1835–45), and there he completed Caloric.