bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Between Hostile Camps: Sir Humphry Davy's Presidency of The Royal Society of London, 1820–1827
Authors: Miller David Philip
Published: January 2009

The career of Humphry Davy (1778–1829) is one of the fairy tales of early nineteenth-century British science. His rise from obscure Cornish origins to world-wide eminence as a chemical discoverer, to popular celebrity amongst London's scientific audiences, to a knighthood from the Prince Regent, and finally to the Presidency of the Royal Society, provide apposite material for Smilesian accounts of British society as open to talents. But the use of Davy's career to illustrate the thesis that ‘genius will out’ is not without its problems. As Davy began to reap the benefits of his early chemical discoveries, and to acquire status and wealth, his dedication to research waned. The ‘new’ Davy who emerged in the years after Waterloo, though admired by many sections of the metropolitan scientific community, was also widely criticized. Ambivalence became marked with Davy's election to, and conduct in, the Presidency of the Royal Society.
Philip II's Patronage of Science and Engineering
Authors: Goodman David
Published: January 2009

Philip II a patron of the sciences? This aspect of his turbulent reign, like many others, bas brought conflicting assessments. He bas been praised for his enterprise and blamed for isolating Spain from the scientific revolution. More information has now become available as a resuit of research on related themes, and it seems opportune to reconsider Philip's relations with the sciences. This has not attracted much attention outside of Spain because of the general neglect of the history of Spanish science. Yet Spain was no intellectual backwater—it had a rich scientific culture which was still alive in the sixteenth century. And the question of Philip's patronage is important since Castile had become the heart of the most powerful empire in the West at a time when Europe was experiencing a new phase of the Reformation and the beginnings of scientific revolution.
Julius Thomsen and classical thermochemistry
Authors: Kragh Helge
Published: January 2009

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.
Richard Owen's Reaction to Transmutation in the 1830's
Authors: Desmond Adrian
Published: January 2009

Following Michael Bartholomew's study of ‘Lyell and Evolution’ in 1973, scholars have become increasingly interested in the response of gentlemen geologists to Lamarckism during the reign of William IV (1830–7). Bartholomew contended that Charles Lyell was ‘alone in scenting the danger’ for man of using transmutation to explain fossil progression, and that he reacted to the threat of bestialisation by restructuring palaeontology along safe non-progressionist lines. Like his Anglican contemporaries, Lyell was concerned to prove that man was no transformed ape, and that morals were not the better part of brute instinct. Dov Ospovat has subsequently suggested that Lyell's theory of climate was equally an attempt to thwart the transformists and ‘preserve man's unique status in creation’. In other words, Lyell's biology and geology were inextricably related inPrinciples of Geologyand his ideology affected his science as a whole. Finally, Pietro Corsi has identified the Continental materialists who most probably alerted Lyell to the danger, intimating that a conservative British response became imperative when Lyell ‘saw signs of the diffusion of transformism in England itself, where it could even form an unholy alliance with prevailing progressionist and directionalist interpretations of the history of life on earth’.
The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet's Statistics
Authors: Porter Theodore M.
Published: January 2009

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. Hismécanique sociale, laterphysique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace'smecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation.
Sadi Carnot and the Steam Engine: Nicolas Clément's lectures on industrial chemistry 1823–28
Authors: Lervig Philip
Published: January 2009

Le manuscrit publié ici pour la première fois se compose des notes du cours de Chimie Industrielle professé par Nicolas Clément au Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers à Paris en 1823, prises par le mathématicien L. B. Francoeur. Quelques extraits de ce même cours, datant de 1824–28, rédigés par J. M. Baudot, ont été ajoutés. Plusieurs de ces extraits ont déja été publiés précédemment.
Robert FitzRoy and the Early History of the Meteorological Office
Authors: Burton Jim
Published: January 2009

Historians of science have shown little interest in meteorology and, in Britain at least, have almost totally ignored the development of meteorological institutions. The Meteorological Office itself has found some mention at times such as its supposed centenary in 1955, but even then the interest has come mainly from meteorologists writing for the delectation of their fellows. This neglect is surprising because the story of the Office contains much to reward the historian. Its very formation as a governmental scientific institution in 1854 supports arguments against the popular concept of mid-nineteenth century Britain as a cauldron of unbridledlaissez-faire; the role it adopted in developing practical usages for science brought it into conflict with members of the academic scientific establishment; its later transition from an inaugural period as a department of the Board of Trade to a second phase under the control of a committee appointed by the Royal Society, with consequent changes in the methods of financing and administration, gives useful insights into the contemporary attitudes of government officials towards public expenditure on science; and its first head, Robert FitzRoy, was himself a man of such remarkable interest and complexity as to render the subject worthy of investigation on that count alone.
The Berthollet-Proust Controversy and Dalton's Chemical Atomic Theory 1800–1820
Authors: Fujii Kiyohisa
Published: January 2009

The Berthollet-Proust controversy and Dalton's atomic theory are two important historical landmarks which appeared almost simultaneously at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Therefore it is likely that between the theory of definite proportions—one of the main subjects of the controversy–and Dalton's atomic theory there was an important interrelation, and that they reinforced each other. Kapoor has suggested that Proust could not have been the forerunner of Dalton's law of constant and multiple proportions, because Dalton discovered his law from completely different premises, and does not seem to have got his ideas from Proust. In my opinion, however, his conclusion does not seem to be decisive.
History of Science Today, 1. Uniformity as Hidden Diversity: History of Science in the United States, 1920–1940
Authors: Reingold Nathan
Published: January 2009

Between the two World Wars an extensive body of writings appeared in the United States explicitly or implicitly on the historical development of the sciences. I am not referring to the vast literature of popularization in magazines and newspapers but to substantial works, often in book form, coming from various intellectual and scholarly traditions. Only a few examples are classifiable by later standards as professional history of science. Following Arnold Thackray, one can designate some authors as ‘proto-historians’ of science. Most of the writings, including those of the ‘proto-historians,’ have distinctive attributes: methods, attitudes and goals, reflecting traditions other than professional history of science or even the general history exemplified by the American Historical Association's membership of that era. What follows is a bird's eye view of a past of interest for its own sake and for clues about the professionalization of history of science after 1950.
The Principle of Plenitude and Natural Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Yeo Richard R.
Published: January 2009

In his classic study,The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy delineated a complex set of concepts and assumptions which referred to the perfection of God and the fullness of creation. In attempting to distil the basic or ‘unit idea’ which constituted this pattern of thought, he focused on the assumption that ‘the universe is aplenum formarumin which the range of conceivable diversity ofkindsof living things is exhaustively exemplified’. He called this the ‘principle of plenitude’. Lovejoy argued that this idea implied two others—continuity and gradation—and that together these reflected a pre-occupation with the ‘necessity of imperfection in all its possible degrees’, a concern which had pervaded Western thought since Plato and gave rise to the powerful ontology known as the ‘great chain of being’.
A Question of Properly Rights: Richard Owen's Evolutionism Reassessed
Authors: Richards Evelleen
Published: January 2009

WhenVestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous evolutionary work which caused such a furore in mid-Victorian England, was published towards the close of 1844, Richard Owen, by then well-entrenched as the ‘British Cuvier’, received a complementary copy and addressed a letter to the author. This letter and how it should be interpreted have recently become the subject of historical debate, and this paper is directed at resolving the controversy. The question of Owen's attitude to theVestigesargument is central to the larger historical problem of the views of this leading British morphologist and palaeontologist on the contentious issue of the ‘secondary causes’ of species. Owen wrote so little directly on this subject prior to 1858, that the letter in question, together with his two letters of 1848 to the rationalist publisher John Chapman, and the controversial conclusion to hisOn the Nature of Limbs(1849), constitute the major evidence that Owen in this period subscribed to a naturalistic theory of organic change. On the basis of this evidence, historians of biology have generally concurred with Owen's biographer grandson that Owen had a ‘certain leaning towards the theories enunciated by Robert Chambers [the Vestiges' author]’, but that his ‘official’ anti-transmutationist stance of the 1840s did not permit full public expression of his own views. As Ruse most recently summed up this historical consensus: Owen in the 1840s was ‘moving down a path not completely dissimilar from that followed by Chambers’, and he ‘tried to have matters two ways, praisingVestigesto its author and condemning it to its critics’.
Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality
Authors: Shortland Michael
Published: January 2009

Although phrenology has begun to receive serious attention as a doctrine of mind, as popular science, as part of medical history, as a vehicle for social and ideological interests, and as an important component of American and European (especially British) culture in the early nineteenth century, there is one aspect of it which has evaded the eye of contemporary historians.’ This is the place within phrenology of the understanding of human sexuality. This is a subject of manifest general historical interest, and one whose neglect by scholars seems all the more striking once it is recognized that phrenologists themselves often judged it the most crucial, the best evidenced, and the most impressive part of their system of beliefs. In turning for the first time to phrenological attitudes to sex, my objective in what follows is not to offer an exhaustive treatment but rather to set down the broad lines of development followed by organological and phrenological doctrines. It is hoped that this will encourage and enable historians to consider the subject in further detail and from other perspectives. Other topics of research may also be suggested by the material that is presented here. For example, if phrenology was as important in the early decades of the nineteenth century as is now widely accepted, and if the views of sexual instinct within the theory and practice of phrenology were of the kind which I shall suggest, then it may be that our general attitudes to sexuality during the period under consideration stand in need of reassessment. This is an issue to which I hope to devote a further article; for the moment, a presentation of materials within a mainly expository framework may serve a valuable function.
Screen Memories: Towards a History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the Movies
Authors: Shortland Michael
Published: January 2009

In his famous biography, Ernest Jones turns aside from his central theme at one point to relate a curious episode involving psychoanalysis and Hollywood, in the persons of Freud and the well-known film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Like many others in the film industry, Goldwyn was fascinated with the challenge of exploiting the association between psychoanalysis and sex on screen, but although he approached ‘the greatest love specialist in the world’ with an offer of $100 000 for his co-operation in making a movie, Freud declined and even refused to see him. To some degree, Freud's antagonism sprang from his distaste for America and its values, which he contemptuously dismissed as a blend of crude behaviourism, materialism and consumerism, epitomized in the figure of Goldwyn, whose reputation for vulgarity had preceded his arrival in Europe. But for the most part, he remained sceptical that the theories of psychoanalysis could ever be properly expressed on the silver screen, even when the attempt was made by two close acquaintances, Hanns Sachs and Karl Abraham.
Utility and Audience in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry: Case Studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley
Authors: Golinski J. V.
Published: January 2009

Historians of science are less inclined now than they were a few years ago to regard chemistry as having sprung full-grown from the mind of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Many of the contours of pre-Lavoisierian chemistry have recently been mapped, its Newtonian and Stahlian theoretical traditions have been delineated, and the degree of coherence enforced on the subject by its didactic role has been argued. In addition, the social prominence and cohesion achieved by chemists in various national contexts, such as France, Scotland and Germany, have been investigated. Karl Hufbauer (arguing specifically from the case of Germany) and Christoph Meinel have proposed that the cultural climate of the European Enlightenment provided the language and the social settings in which chemistry could be detached from its previous role as a service-art for medicine, and presented as a science with diverse practical applications.
Biology as Social Theory: John Scott Haldane and Physiological Regulation
Authors: Sturdy Steve
Published: January 2009

During the first forty years of this century, the concept of a living organism was discussed widely and publicly by biologists and philosophers. Two questions in particular excited discussion. In what ways should organisms be considered different from or the same as dead matter? And what can we learn about the nature of human society by regarding it as analogous to a living organism? Inevitably, these questions were closely related; the conclusions to be drawn about the social organism would depend upon the particular properties attributed to the biological organism. In more recent years, discussion of these issues has largely been in abeyance, as biologists have with-drawn from debate over social policy into a more remote academia. A few biologists who still see their work as relevant to a wider social agenda have continued to treat the nature of life as a contentious issue. But the focus of interest has shifted away from the organismic analogy, which concerns the organization of society as a whole, to issues like sociobiology and evolutionary theory, which emphasize social differentiation and the treatment of out-groups and minorities.
Observations on the History of Science in Italy
Authors: Torrini Maurizio
Published: January 2009

In two conferences, separated by the space of only a few months, in September 1966 and March 1967, Giovanni Polvani—at the time president of theDomus Galilaeana—and the council of theDomus, attempted a series of operations, all ambitious and difficult. The first, and to some extent the simplest, was to gather round theDomusall those who were working in a professional role or as amateurs on the history of science. Also invited were scholars who had become involved in the discipline through the territorial or thematic nature of their particular interests (as was the case with Luigi Firpo, Cesare Vasoli and others), or who had some special relation to the history of science of a more, so to speak, extrinsic kind, people such as archivists, librarians, and so on. Secondly, the organizers wished—and here was where the difficulties began—to start up a discussion (not limited to mere theory) on what people understood the history of science to be, what its relationship was with the history of technology, of philosophy, and with cultural history in general. As hinted above, the discussion was not meant to be on abstract theoretical terms, since it was designed to serve as a premise for an even more complex project, that is to set up a centre for the training of future historians of science. As often happens, in the heat of discussing the concrete problems which were the subject of the first meeting at Pisa (the sources of the history of science, limited to Italy, and only to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), there emerged difficulties, various orientations, evaluations and declarations, which were both meaningful and enlightening.
The ‘Beame of Diuinity’: Animal suffering in the Early Thought of Robert Boyle
Authors: Oster Malcolm R.
Published: January 2009

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.
Darwin's Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning
Authors: Kohn David
Published: January 2009

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. TheOriginabounds 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.
A Note on Bechmann's approximate construction of π, suggested by a deleted sketch in Villard de Honnecourt's manuscript
Authors: Tee Garry J.
Published: January 2009

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.
Generation and the Origin of Species (1837–1937): A Historiographical Suggestion
Authors: Hodge M. J. S.
Published: January 2009

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’.
The Dimensions of Scientific Controversy: The Biometric—Mendelian Debate
Authors: Olby Robert
Published: January 2009

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.
Geneticists and the Eugenics Movement in Scandinavia
Authors: Roll-Hansen Nils
Published: January 2009

Two questions will receive special attention in this account, namely the political location of eugenics and the role of genetic science in its development. I will show that moderate eugenic policies had broad political support. For instance, the Scandinavian sterilization laws which were introduced in the 1930s were supported by the Social Democratic Parties, who were partly in position of government. I will argue that the effect of genetic research was to make eugenics more moderate, mainly because the fears and hopes were shown to be exaggerated. Degeneration was much slower than feared at first, if it took place at all, and the expectation of rapid and large effects of eugenic policies on the gene pool likewise proved to be quite unrealistic.
The Biology of Stupidity: Genetics, Eugenics and Mental Deficiency in the Inter-War Years
Authors: Barker David
Published: January 2009

It may be thought that the title of this paper betrays a regrettable lack of sensitivity and good taste; it is as well, therefore, to explain its origin. Lewis Dexter was, I think, the first sociologist to apply a deviance perspective to the high-grade mentally retarded. ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’ argues that our discriminatory attitudes to the retarded have deep ideological roots; our social institutions tend ‘automatically’ to penalize stupidity; and repugnance often characterizes our face-to-face interactions with the stupid. The pejorative label ‘stupid’ was justified precisely because identifying the stupid is a ‘commonsense’ rather than a scientific process, although commonsense does not have long to wait before it is bolstered by science.
Alchemy, magic and moralism in the thought of Robert Boyle
Authors: Hunter Michael
Published: January 2009

At some point during the last two years of his life, Robert Boyle dictated to his friend, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, some notes on major events and themes in his career. Some of the information he divulged in these memoranda has become quite widely known because Burnet used it in the funeral sermon for Boyle that he delivered a month after his death, at St Martin's in the Fields on 7 January 1692. In addition, these notes were cited several times by Thomas Birch in the ‘Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle’ that he prefixed to his edition of Boyle's collected works of 1744: he there describes his source as ‘Mr.Boyle'smemorandums of his own life, dictated by himself to BishopBurnet’.2 What has hitherto been virtually overlooked is that the manuscript of these notes, which is in Burnet's hand, survives among the Birch Papers in the British Library: it is this document—and particularly a substantial component of it which was publicized by neither Burnet nor Birch—that forms the starting point for this paper.
Einstein and relativistic thermodynamics in 1952: a historical and critical study of a strange episode in the history of modern physics
Authors: Liu Chuang
Published: January 2009

Over forty years after the foundations of the special theory of relativity had been securely laid, a heated debate, beginning in 1965, about the correct formulation of relativistic thermodynamics raged in the physics literature. Prior to 1965, relativistic thermodynamics was considered one of the most secure relativistic theories and one of the most simple and elegant examples of relativization in physics. It is, as its name apparently suggests, the result of the application of the special theory of relativity to thermodynamics. The basic assumption is that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are Lorentz-invariant, and, as a result, a set of Lorentz transformations is derived from thermodynamic magnitudes, such as heat and temperature.
Desperately seeking status: Evolutionary Systematics and the taxonomists' search for respectability 1940–60
Authors: Vernon Keith
Published: January 2009

Science in the twentieth century has relied on enormous financial investment for its survival. Once departed from an amateur pursuit, industry, charity and government have ploughed huge resources into it, supplying the professional occupation of science with a complex of institutional facilities – full-time posts, research laboratories, students and journals. Financial support, however, has always been a limited resource and has gone most generously to those areas of research which appear particularly novel, innovative or promising, that is to the ‘leading edges’. To secure the funds necessary to maintain their life-style, then, scientists have had to make their activities scientifically and economically attractive to the funding bodies. Historians and sociologists of twentieth-century science have tended to follow these priorities and have concentrated on the leading edges. We have studied at length the acquisition of new knowledge through research, the creation of the institutional complex and the furtherance of science through innovation, specialty and discipline formation, part and parcel of which is the gathering of the necessary funds. The competition for funds has been investigated in analyses of controversy between competing groups within a research area, which has provided important models for the social and conceptual development of science. This emphasis, however, may have missed a great deal of what happens in science.
‘A duty of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical criticism
Authors: Mandelbrote Scott
Published: January 2009

Will Ladislaw's words, which so disillusion the young Dorothea, might also depress the modern interpreter of Newton's theology. Encountering the bulk of Newton's manuscript theology, it is tempting to sympathize with Dorothea's eventual response toThe Key to all Mythologies, and to want nothing of it. The assessment of John Conduitt, Newton's son-in-law and executor, that his ‘relief and amusement was going to some other study, as history, chronology, divinity, and chemistry’ has in the past provided an ample excuse for those who have wished to take such a course, and to ignore Newton's biblical criticism. In the last three decades, however, Newton scholarship has come to terms with its hero's twilight activities, and reclassified them as being at least as important to him as the natural philosophy of thePrincipia, and intimately bound up with the thinking behind that philosophy. But although many modern scholars are now reluctant to see Newton as Stephen Hawking in breeches, historians of science have tended to concentrate on the implications for Newton's philosophy of his religious and alchemical writings, and in the process often have distorted their religious context. Historians of ideas have been beguiled by Newton's disciples, and by the esoteric texts from Newton's library, to ride hobbyhorses of their own which do not always illuminate Newton's reasons for writing theology. There is a danger of ‘knowing what is being done by the rest of the world’ before troubling with what Newton was up to when he worried about religion and theology, channelling his energies into treatise after treatise on the interpretation of prophecy. I want to suggest what some of Newton's concerns may have been, by looking at his ideas of religious duty and of the Church, and to liberate Newton from his disciples for long enough to consider some of his ideas about the relationships of prophetic and natural philosophical explorations of divinity.
Ways of knowing: towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine
Authors: Pickstone John V.
Published: January 2009

Among the many groups of scholars whose work now illuminates science, technology and medicine (STM), historians, it seems to me, have a key responsibility not just to elucidate change but to establish and explain variety. One of the big pictures we need is a model of the varieties of STM over time; one which does not presume the timeless existence of disciplines, or the distinctions between science, technology and medicine; a model which is both synchronic and diachronic, and both cognitive and social. To that end, this brief paper presents a historical typology of STM from about 1700 to the present by focusing on four ‘ideal’ socio-cognitive types – four knowledge structures which correspond to four sets of social relations. To some extent these are period specific, but they do not have to be – hence, one may hope, the flexibility and usefulness of the model.
‘Nullius in verba’ and ‘nihil in verbis’: public understanding of the role of language in science
Authors: Sutton Clive
Published: January 2009

This paper is about how the motto of the Royal Society has sometimes been misread, but it is also about how such a misreading could arise at all, and why it persists. I argue that the error is intimately associated with a traditional view of scientific language as a medium for descriptive reporting, a view which has been very influential in schools, and is consequently perpetuated in the public understanding of science. Much new scholarship confirms that this ‘straightforward’ view of what scientists do can no longer be accepted at face value, and that the role of language in science is more intimate and subtle in its interpretive and persuasive qualities. A renewed study of the motto is interesting in itself, but it will also serve to introduce these wider matters. Perhaps it may help some more teachers to escape from those received ideas about language which have restricted the range of learning activities in school science, and discouraged a full attention to the words in which scientists choose to express their ideas.
Conflicts in human progress: sexual selection and the Fisherian ‘runaway’
Authors: Hartley Mary M.
Published: January 2009

R. A. Fisher is perhaps best known for his influential theoretical contributions to the ‘Evolutionary Synthesis’ of the 1930s and 1940s in which biometry was reconciled with Mendelism. It is no accident, I believe, that when historians discuss the ‘Synthesis’, the names R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane are nearly always given in that order. Fisher's 1918 paper ‘The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance’ suggested that biometry, which emphasized the distribution of characters based on continuous variation, and Mendelism, which emphasized discontinuous characters, were compatible and could be united to study evolutionary change. If one considered large numbers of discontinuous, Mendelian characters, then statistical biometrical analysis could be conducted. Thus, Fisher argued, biometry and Mendelism need not oppose each other.
‘The emergency which has arrived’: the problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outline
Authors: Fisch Menachem
Published: January 2009

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’.
Fleeming Jenkin andThe Origin of Species: a reassessment
Authors: Morris Susan W.
Published: January 2009

Early in June of 1867, Charles Darwin turned back the cover of his copy of the respected quarterlyNorth British Review, to find on its opening pages a lengthy essay attacking his theory of natural selection. As with the vast majority of articles in the Victorian periodicals, the review was anonymous, prompting immediate speculation in Darwin's circle as to the author's identity. It was to be about a year-and-a-half before Darwin would learn that the engineer Fleeming Jenkin had written the essay. By then, Darwin had concluded that the critique was the most valuable he had ever read onThe Origin of Species.
‘A treasure of hidden vertues’: the attraction of magnetic marketing
Authors: Fara Patricia
Published: January 2009

When customers like Samuel Pepys visited the shop of Thomas Tuttell, instrument maker to the king, they could purchase a pack of mathematical playing-cards. The seven of spades, reproduced as Figure 1, depicted the diverse connotations of magnets, or loadstones. These cards cost a shilling, and were too expensive for many of the surveyors, navigators and other practitioners shown using Tuttell's instruments. They provide an early example of the products promising both diversion and improvement which were increasingly marketed to polite audiences. Tuttell's description of loadstone as ‘a treasure of hidden vertues’ encapsulated many contemporary perceptions of these naturally occurring magnets which were to endure throughout the century. This phrase, with its hints of concealed financial and epistemological benefits, resonates with major eighteenth-century analytical themes, such as commercialization, the opposition between vice and virtue, and the fascination with the occult in the face of Enlightenment rationality. This card is emblematic of the multiple interpretations and utilizations of magnetic phenomena during the eighteenth century. It thus provides a useful starting-point for exploring some of the disputes which arose as enterprising individuals concerned with natural philosophy promoted themselves, their activities and their products.
Lecture demonstrations and the real world: the case of cart-wheels
Authors: Wess Jane
Published: January 2009

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.
Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s London
Authors: Iliffe Rob
Published: January 2009

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.
Karl Pearson's Gresham lectures: W. F. R. Weldon, speciation and the origins of Pearsonian statistics
Authors: Magnello M. Eileen
Published: January 2009

The scientific legacy of Karl Pearson and his role as one of the principal architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics, has generated enough interest to have created an intellectual enterprise on various aspects of his life and work. Despite this interest, Pearson's earliest and most formative statistical work which he delivered in thirty of his thirty-eight Gresham lectures from 17 November 1891 to 11 May 1894 has, to date, been given very little consideration. Pearson is perhaps, best known to historians of science for his first eight Gresham lectures, delivered in London in February and May, 1891, on ‘The Scope and Method of Modern Science’, as these lectures were published with modification in theGrammar of Sciencein 1892. The only discussions which have emerged from some of the other thirty lectures have come from Egon Pearson and Steve Stigler. As the great bulk of these lectures have not been fully utilized, previous attempts to identify the impetus to his statistical work have been derived either from his teaching of correlation at University College London in 1895–96 or from his third statistical paper which, in part, addresses Francis Galton's work on simple correlation and simple regression. In spite of the emphasis on Galton's work on simple correlation and regression, little attention has been given to Pearson's more innovative work in that paper, which includes his development of the following statistical methods: multiple correlation, multiple regression, the standard error of estimate, the coefficient of variation and the use of determinantal matrix algebra for biometrical methods. This use of a higher form of algebra not only provided a most striking departure from earlier forms and uses of statistics, but it led to an increasing specialization in the emerging discipline of ‘mathematical statistics’.
Presidential Address: Getting science across
Authors: Knight David
Published: January 2009

‘Read until you hear the voices’; so the maxim goes for those who would engage with the Victorians. Let us try with Thomas Henry Huxley:

A great chapter in the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.
Sources for a history of the ternary diagram
Authors: Howarth Richard J.
Published: January 2009

Anyone reading the literature on the history of graphs will soon realize that the use of graphie displays of any type was really quite unusual until the mid-ninetenth century and that those scientists who did make use of them are often familiar to us as creative thinkers in their own fields of endeavour. Aternary diagram(also known as atriangular diagram) is a particular type of graph which consists of an equilateral triangle in which a given plotted point represents the relative proportions (a, b, c) of three end-members (A, B and C), generally expressed as percentages and constrained bya + b + c= 100%. It has long been used to portray sample composition in terms of three constituents, or an observed colour in terms of three primary colours, because it is a convenient means of representing a three-component System in a planar projection, rather than as an isometric, or similar, view of a three-dimensional space. Recent papers suggest that its use is not as familiar to some statisticians as are other commonly used forms of graph. For example, although it was cited by Peddle in 1910 and more recently by Dickinson, it is not discussed in modern texts on statistical graphies nor in the key papers on the history of graphs. However, beginning with studies of colour-mixing in the eighteenth century, it has subsequently become widely used, particularly in geology, physical chemistry and metallurgy. In this paper, I attempt to document its gradual uptake as a standard method of data display and some of the scientific advances which its use has facilitated.
Constructing South Kensington: the buildings and politics of T. H. Huxley's working environments
Authors: Forgan Sophie , Gooday Graeme
Published: January 2009

Biography and geography do not always sit easily together in historical narrative. With a few notable exceptions, due weight is rarely given to the significance of territorial features in tales of talented individuals. Biographers perhaps play down the untidy contingencies of civic, institutional and domestic spaces in order to present a historiographically coherent portrait of their subject. However, once the vicissitudes of environment and everyday life are taken into account, the identity and accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ begin to merge inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-cultural alliances. For a figure with as formidable a posthumous reputation as T. H. Huxley, such a deconstruction might, at first, seem mundane and of little scholarly value. Yet there is considerable evidence that Huxley was not always successful in his efforts to gain power and influence within the many and varied sites of his working environments. Careful scrutiny of such evidence will show new perspectives on Huxley's complex career in Victorian London. It will also document problems in the construction of the South Kensington suburb as a credible site and fruitful resource for Huxley's remarkably diverse activities in education and science.