The group which worked with Lavoisier in his laboratory also collaborated with him in publication and jointly edited the journal Annales de chimie. It has a good claim to be considered as a research school. Most historians of chemistry, who have studied the ‘chemical revolution’ in France, have focused uniquely on Lavoisier, giving scant attention to his co-workers and ignoring his assistants, thus overlooking their collective research, which created something of a precedent for nineteenth-century science. It has also been too easily assumed that the Lavoisier story ends with his death in 1794. After his demise, continuity with his ideas and method of working was provided by his former associates, particularly Berthollet in the Society of Arcueil. Further continuity was provided by the successive careers of Gay-Lussac, Dumas and Wurtz. In an increasing spirit of nationalism in the nineteenth century there developed a strong French tradition which looked back to Lavoisier as the founder of modern chemistry and a source of inspiration for collaboration in chemical research.

In 1875 T. H. Huxley discovered that a secretion from the mould penicillium glaucum had an ability, unconnected with oxygen deprivation, to inhibit bacterial growth. He recorded his observations in his notebooks and in a single letter to John Tyndall, who at that time was a friend of Lister and a correspondent of Pasteur. Neither Huxley nor Tyndall looked for an explanation of this phenomenon, and neither told anyone else about it.

The phenomenon of the Giant's Causeway in the north of Ireland has attracted much attention over five centuries. This essay recounts the formative years between 1688 and 1708 of the Giant's Causeway as a field site and ‘philosophical landscape’ in the light of recent research on the historical geographies of scientific knowledge. This research has provided new perspectives on field science, emphasizing the spatial character of the field and its discursive formation in different spaces. A view of the field as a self-contained unit in which science is practised is rendered problematic. Instead, it is seen as part of a network of intersecting locales within which scientists and science circulate. This essay draws upon this work, exploring and mapping the spaces and techniques used by late seventeenth-century natural philosophers in London and Dublin to generate observational and conceptual knowledge of the Giant's Causeway. In doing so, the paper contributes to an understanding of the spaces of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, of the knowledge networks within which the virtuosi operated and of the earth science field site.

Even before the success of William Perkin's mauve at the end of the 1850s, there were attempts to synthesize artificial dyes that were identical with those found in nature. Alizarin, the dye derived from the madder root, was the first to be investigated, and it was Perkin who was to file for a patent in June 1869 just one day before the German chemists Heinrich Caro, Carl Graebe and Carl Liebermann. Rivalry between the parties soon turned to negotiations and collaboration. Perkin's company retained the British trade, while the Germans, in the form of the Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) controlled the continental European and United States markets. This and similar agreements extinguished the madder trade, and subsequently artificial alizarin passed almost completely to the Germans. They achieved a monopoly by dictating the level and prices of supplies, which did much to diminish the strength of the dye-making industry in Britain. The formation in 1882–83 of the British Alizarine Company did little to redress the overall balance. This taught British dye firms a tough lesson. The same, they hoped, would not be allowed to happen again, even when the attention of the German research chemists turned to indigo.

The spread of modern science to India, the non-scientific culture area according to Basalla's thesis, under the colonial umbrella played an important role in shaping the history of Indian people. Notwithstanding its colonial flavour, the new science left a distinct impression on the minds of the local populace. The belief that the Indian mind was not ripe enough to assimilate the new ideas, supported by a few instances of their (Indian) hostility towards some imported technologies, has dominated historical writings since the Macaulian era. This proposition requires close scrutiny of the contemporary evidence. In this paper, I have tried to explain the various shades of Indian experiences with European science and technology during the first hundred years of British rule.

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.

From the 1980s onwards, the Roslin Institute and its predecessor organizations faced budget cuts, organizational upheaval and considerable insecurity. Over the next few decades, it was transformed by the introduction of molecular biology and transgenic research, but remained a hub of animal geneticists conducting research aimed at the livestock-breeding industry. This paper explores how these animal geneticists embraced genomics in response to the many-faceted precarity that the Roslin Institute faced, establishing it as a global centre for pig genomics research through forging and leading the Pig Gene Mapping Project (PiGMaP); developing and hosting resources, such as a database for genetic linkage data; and producing associated statistical and software tools to analyse the data. The Roslin Institute leveraged these resources to play a key role in further international collaborations as a hedge against precarity. This adoption of genomics was strategically useful, as it took advantage of policy shifts at the national and European levels towards funding research with biotechnological potential. As genomics constitutes a set of infrastructures and resources with manifold uses, the development of capabilities in this domain also helped Roslin to diversify as a response to precarity.

We argue that industrial hazards have remained an integral feature of the international and ‘global’ economy since the early modern period, and invite historians of science into the study of their history. The growth and dissemination of knowledge about these hazards, as well as the production and trade that generate them, continue to generate deep inequalities in just who is exposed to them, as illustrated by the shifting impact of the asbestos-related disease plague in the past half-century. Exposure levels in poorer countries have risen as those in affluent societies have fallen, the latter due as much to popular protest and media exposure as to scientific expertise. We suggest that the best way to understand the formation of knowledge about these hazards is not to return to the epistemological battlegrounds of the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s but to seek more interdisciplinary integration of the multifaceted ways that material bodies, environments and interests contribute to an understanding of such hazards and injuries. We propose the framework of ‘industrial-hazard regimes’ as an avenue into the ways in which knowledge about risks and dangers at work are created, translated and contested in different countries and times. While urging a return, in some respects, to the early models of ‘progressive enlightenment’ devised by radical commentators and pioneering historians of the industrial hazard in the early twentieth century, we would revise these early approaches, and also offer some sceptical commentary on the difficulties raised, more recently, by narratives of ‘heroic populism’ or ‘anti-science epidemiology’. The critical standpoints for which we argue recognize the diverse social and political identities and loyalties not only of past contributors to the controversies on industrial hazard, but also of historians of science and medicine themselves.

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group of aficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: the Philosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.

During the years 1814–1819, William Higgins, an Irish chemist who worked at the Dublin Society, claimed he had anticipated John Dalton in developing the atomic theory and insinuated that Dalton was a plagiarist. This essay focuses not on William Higgins, but on his uncle Bryan Higgins, a well-known chemist of his day, who had developed his own theories of caloric and chemical combination, similar in many respects to that of Dalton. New evidence is first introduced addressing Bryan's disappearance from the scientific community after 1803. In his later years, Bryan apparently suffered from a condition resulting in a decline in his mental health, which explains why he never lodged any priority claims of his own against Dalton, or defended those of his nephew. Dalton's mention of Bryan's name in Part II of A New System of Chemical Philosophy, his laboratory notebook entries, and a fresh look at his correspondence with chemist Thomas Charles Hope indicate that Dalton adopted a Higgins-like caloric model in 1803. Together these factors provide evidence to support the argument that Dalton learned of Bryan's theories via a meeting he had with William Allen on 10 July 1803. Existing evidence related to the origin of the atomic theory is worthy of re-examination in light of Dalton's possible prior knowledge of Bryan's work.

Two major problems in understanding Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) are that he wrote so much and over such a wide area. The nineteenth-century edition of his collected works fills 25 volumes—and that leaves out the science! In discussing a man like Priestley, therefore, one cannot hope in a single lecture to do justice to the wide range of his interests or even to summarise adequately his many contributions to science. Fortunately much of the scientific work is fairly well known, for example his discovery of many new gases or ‘airs’, as he preferred to call them. It might be appropriate, therefore, to try to put Priestley's pneumatic chemistry in a wider context and in particular to relate it to his career. Priestley was not only an important man of science. He was also an outspoken theologian, a literary figure and a family man, and all of these roles (and several others, including his political role on behalf of Dissenters) will have to be taken into consideration when the definitive biography is written.

This paper argues that Goethe's collections, in particular his mineralogical collections, had both public and private purposes. The public purposes were closely tied to the tradition of mineralogizing exemplified by the Freiberg Mining Academy. Abraham Gottlob Werner provided technologies for standardizing mineralogical terminology and identification, and Goethe hoped that these technologies would allow for a vast network of collectors and observers who would collate their observations and develop a model of the Earth's structure. His own cabinet, in particular his collection of rocks (Gebirgsarten), was to be a representative sample of rock formations in particular locations that could reveal features of the Earth's structure and history. Goethe was also responsible for the scientific collections of Jena University. He argued that if such collections were to be useful for teaching and research, a goal he strongly supported, they could no longer be treated as the private property of professors. He recognized that social relations within the University would have to be reordered if museums were to fulfil their epistemic functions. In this respect Goethe was on the side of the modern museum and opposed to the world of the private collection and all its idiosyncrasies. However, his own collections had very private and personal purposes. Using some of the ideas of Walter Benjamin as a foil, this paper tries to uncover some of the private passions that fuelled Goethe's almost insatiable collecting. Though these passions were peculiar to Goethe, I argue that historians of science should attend more to the passions and their place in the sciences.

This paper explores the transition to synthetic dyestuffs through a principal focus on developments within the last major holdout of the natural-dye industry, the blue colourant indigo. It starts by looking closely at existing practices of cultivation and manufacture of the natural dye in colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also develops a case study based on targeted efforts scientifically to improve plant-derived indigo in laboratories and experiment stations in colonial India and imperial England. Experts attempted to increase yields and enhance the purity of the natural dye to meet the competition of the cheaper and purer synthetic indigo launched on the international market in 1897 by two German firms, BASF and Hoechst. The paper explains the patronage of science by European planters, the colonial state and the metropolitan government and analyses the nature of science that emerged in the colonial–imperial nexus.

Thomas Thomson (177–1852) is primarily remembered as the author of the textbook A System of Chemistry which dominated the British field for about 30 years. In his chosen subject of chemistry his enthusiastic support of Daltonian chemical atomism and his zealous support of Prout's hypothesis have been recently recognized. Yet his activities were not as restricted as received opinion suggests. When Thomson assumed in 1818 the newly created Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, the prospects for him as teacher and researcher were apparently encouraging. But he met difficulties in his attempts to elevate the status of the Regius Professors at Glasgow and in his concurrent endeavours to develop chemistry as an autonomous science. The ensuing controversy, first private and then public, spanned more than 20 rancorous years. Only one of Thomson's obituarists, however, even briefly mentions this debate; and recent writers on Thomson either ignore it completely or skim over it lightly. The main purpose of this paper is therefore to redress the balance of previous work on Thomson by outlining the chief features of his professorial period, paying particular attention to his style of teaching and attitude to his subject. For Thomson the development of his discipline was inseparable from the question of his status as a Regius Professor. Accordingly I also try to show that he played an important role in the movement for reform of the Scottish Universities and I discuss the structure of power at the University of Glasgow. Such analysis is necessary for understanding Thomson's appraisal of his situation as Regius Professor of Chemistry. In order to put his professorial period into the context of his earlier work I introduce the main body of the article with a short reconsideration of the form and significance of his career before 1817, when he moved to Glasgow.

In this paper we will discuss some of the issues related to the attempts of Ralph Howard Fowler and Nevil Vincent Sidgwick to create a legitimizing space for quantum and theoretical chemistry in Britain. Although neither Fowler nor Sidgwick made original contributions to quantum chemistry, they followed closely the developments in the discipline, participated in meetings and discussions and delivered lectures, talks and addresses, where methodological topics, ontological questions and implicitly the problem of autonomy of the new discipline vis-à-vis both physics and chemistry were taken to be pressing issues. In particular, they encouraged young people to work within the nascent discipline. Viewing quantum chemistry as a branch of applied mathematics became an emblematic characteristic of the practice of the new discipline in Great Britain.

Gilbert and Mulkay, in their paper ‘Experiments Are the Key’, present responses of scientists to questions about the development of the chemiosmotic hypothesis of energy coupling in oxidative and photophosphorylation, and infer from these responses both the meaninglessness of the concept ‘key experiment’ and the hopelessness of searching for any data as a bedrock for historical analysis. Gilbert and Mulkay's nihilism is, however, rooted in a lack of understanding of the specific scientific issues involved. A closer look at a proposed ‘key experiment’ shows certain obvious characteristics that could be criteria for a ‘key experiment’ moreover, the actual scientific response to that experiment demonstrates its pivotal role in the development of the field. Instead of demonstrating the lack of empirical bases for scientific judgment, Gilbert and Mulkay demonstrate the necessity for identifying the crucial issues and pursuing them, in questioning the scientists as well as in examining other sources.

‘Poor Borelli!’ exclaimed Alexandre Koyre at the end of his wonderful and by now classic study of Borelli's ‘celestial mechanics’. Koyre frankly admitted that Borelli lacked Newton's genius and intellectual audacity. However, in his story Borelli deserved a place between Kepler and Newton for his ‘imperfect but decisive’ unification of terrestrial and celestial physics. This framework finds a powerful justification in Borelli's extensive usage of Keplerian astronomy and in Newton's references to Borelli's work on the Medicean planets, Theoricae mediceorum planetarum (Florence, 1666), both in his correspondence with Edmond Halley, with regard to a controversy with Robert Hooke, and in Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687). Newton's own copy of Borelli's work with signs of his reading – the famous dog-earings – is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The magnitude of Newton's achievement has haunted Borelli's work ever since Principia mathematica appeared in print. For example, although Christiaan Huygens was sent a copy of Borelli's book by Prince Leopold in 1666, his marginal annotations in his own copy of the book were written after he had read Newton's masterpiece, as if Huygens had felt the need to read the book again after 1687. From then onwards Borelli's work has almost inevitably appeared in a new light that has coloured its subsequent readings.

My ambition in this paper is to provide a fresh reading of Borelli's work by reconstructing its circumstances of composition, establishing a comparison with a relevant strictly contemporary source, and attending to the immediate reception of Theoricae. Borelli's work was written with an eye to a composite audience including Roman Jesuits, Sicilian intellectual circles and Leopold de' Medici's correspondents across the Alps, such as the Copernican astronomer Ismael Boulliau in Paris. Borelli was aware that his Sicilian readers were likely to have different concerns from those of Roman Jesuits or the Medici. Thus the task of charting the reception of his work is a formidable one. For a variety of reasons, including availability of sources, limitations of space, taste and competence, my analysis of Borelli's work on the Medicean planets is limited to a few themes and is not only no less partial than Koyre's, but in many respects it relies on it. If readers feel stimulated to re-read Koyre's text, one of the aims of this paper will have been fulfilled.

This article revisits the question of the social valence of William James's account of the self. As biographers have long noted, James worried much about the crisis of the autonomous, unitary and well-bounded self. This article suggests that, despite his anxieties, James perceived that those features of the self opened up new possibilities both for the individual and for society. By locating the Jamesian self in the context of period techniques for the cultivation of the self, religious and occult practices, and mystical-cum-political discourse, I argue that for James the crisis of the modern self represented a means both of rooting individuals firmly in the community and of endowing them with a form of agency stronger than those promised by traditional doctrines of the simple, self-directed and well-bounded self. Thus, I argue, James's conception of the self and the techniques of the self that he advocated were part and parcel of an attempt to rethink the relationship between individual and community and to promote a new type of society, one composed of spontaneous pluralistic, open and intimate communities.

The theory, method and disciplinary foundations of ‘book history’ are addressed in the context of a close examination of the International Scientific Series, a set of monographs that appeared from 1871 to 1911 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States. Working closely with entrepreneurial publishers, most authors of ISS volumes were scientific professionals (T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer and E. L. Youmans were among the founders) aiming to educate a broad popular audience. Commercial, scholarly and other pressures made the texts less fixed than they appear: revisions, appendices and other evidences of textual instability have been overlooked by previous commentators.