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 article engages the much-debated role of mathematics in Bacon's philosophy and inductive method at large. The many references to mathematics in Bacon's works are considered in the context of the humanist reform of the curriculum studiorum and, in particular, through a comparison with the kinds of natural and intellectual subtlety as they are defined by many sixteenth-century authors, including Cardano, Scaliger and Montaigne. Additionally, this article gives a nuanced background to the ‘subtlety’ commonly thought to have been eschewed by Bacon and by Bacon's self-proclaimed followers in the Royal Society of London. The aim of this article is ultimately to demonstrate that Bacon did not reject the use of mathematics in natural philosophy altogether. Instead, he hoped that following the Great Instauration a kind of non-abstract mathematics could be founded: a kind of mathematics which was to serve natural philosophy by enabling men to grasp the intrinsic subtlety of nature. Rather than mathematizing nature, it was mathematics that needed to be ‘naturalized’.

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.

The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link – simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself – reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.

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.

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.

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.

It is for his scientific achievements that we best remember Frederick Soddy—first as the young chemist working with Ernest Rutherford and with William Ramsay in elaborating the disintegration theory of radioactive change, and then as the mature chemist, heading a research programme of his own at the University of Glasgow, a programme which culminated in his formulation of the concept of isotopes in the years before the First World War. Yet there was another side to Soddy's early scientific career: beyond his profound concern with the purely theoretical and experimental aspects of radioactivity research, there was a serious interest in what might be called the practical significance of his science. By practical, I mean those aspects capable of being put to use for the immediate or potential future benefit of man. In this paper I wish to elucidate the nature of this concern during Soddy's career, focusing particularly upon his years at the University of Glasgow, 1904–1914.

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.

Freud's analogies were legion: hydraulic pipes, military recruitment, magic writing pads. These and some three hundred others took features of the mind and bound them to far-off scenes – the id only very partially resembles an uncontrollable horse, as Freud took pains to note. But there was one relation between psychic and public act that Freud did not delimit in this way: censorship, the process that checked memories and dreams on their way to the conscious. (Freud dubbed the relation between internal and external censorship a ‘parallel’ rather than a limited analogy.) At first, Freud likened this suppression to the blacking out of texts at the Russian frontier. During the First World War, he suffered, and spoke of suffering under, Viennese postal and newspaper censorship – Freud was forced to leave his envelopes unsealed, and to recode or delete content. Over and over, he registered the power of both internal and public censorship in shared form: distortion, anticipatory deletion, softenings, even revision to hide suppression. Political censorship left its mark as the conflict reshaped his view of the psyche into a society on a war footing, with homunculus-like border guards sifting messages as they made their way – or did not – across a topography of mind.

‘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.

In June 1849 William Thomson (Later Lord Kelvin) wrote to Michael Faraday suggesting that the concept of a uniform magnetic field could be used to predict the motions of small magnetic and diamagnetic bodies. In his letter Thomson showed how Faraday's lines of magnetic force could represent the effect of the ‘conducting power’ for magnetic force of matter in the region of magnets. This was Thomson's extension to magnetism of an analogy between the mathematical descriptions of the distribution of static electricity and of the diffusion of heat through uniform bodies. In 1850 Faraday published his first comprehensive theory of the magnetic properties of matter. He explained the behaviour of matter in the field by four assumptions: that matter has a specific disturbing effect on the normal distribution of lines of magnetic force; that this effect depends on its ability to conduct or transmit the magnetic action; and that material bodies tend to move so as to cause the least possible disturbance of the lines from their normal distribution. Faraday also assumed that diamagnetics transmit magnetic action less well than empty space, while paramagnetics transmit it more readily than space. This implied that space must have a specific conductivity between that of paramagnetic and diamagnetic materials. In order to preserve a distinction between matter and space Faraday defined ‘matter’ as either the source of action or as a conductor which is able to influence the lines of action; space was the absence of such powers. While space could conduct, it differed from matter in that it could neither originale lines of force nor influence their course and distribution.

During his long life Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was mainly connected with three European countries: Germany, France and Russia; nevertheless, he had many scientific and personal relations with England, with British scientists, and with other distinguished citizens of Great Britain. Thus Humboldt's life provides an interesting example of international scientific relations in the nineteenth century. The present paper offers a brief account of this universal and versatile scientist's relations with England in particular.

Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) was a major figure in French science throughout the first forty years of the nineteenth century. Though his papers lack the brilliant mathematical creativity of some of those published by even more gifted contemporaries such as Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) and Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857), they nevertheless display a formidable talent for mathematical analysis, applied with great industry and success in a large number of investigations ranging over the whole domain of mathematical physics. Several were of such importance that even on their own they would have sufficed to win him lasting fame.

The Children's Gallery in the Science Museum in London opened in December 1931. Conceived partly as a response to the overwhelming number of children visiting the Museum and partly as a way in which to advance its educational uses, the Gallery proved to be an immediate success in terms of attendances. In the Gallery, children and adults found historical dioramas and models, all of which aimed at presenting visitors with the social, material and moral impacts of science and technology on society throughout history. Also, there were numerous working models with plenty of buttons to press, handles to turn and ropes to pull. Controversial visitor studies carried out in the 1950s revealed that the historical didacticism was more or less lost on the children who came to the Gallery. Consequently, the New Children's Gallery that opened in 1969 had to some extent abandoned the historical perspective in favour of combining instruction with pleasure in order to make the children feel that ‘science is a wonderful thing’.

Frederick Soddy (1877–1956), one of the foremost radiochemists of his day, was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Soddy was also among the first of the scientific leaders of his age, along with Blackett (1897–1974), Bernal (1901–71), and others, to become interested in the social implications of their work. In 1950 his colleague Paneth wrote that currently ‘there is widespread discussion on the responsibility towards the community of men of science and particularly experts in radioactivity; but a perusal of Prof. Soddy's non-chemical writings of no less than thirty years ago [viz., during and after the first world war] shows how strongly he felt the duty to fight for a better order of things'. Soddy was a complex iconoclast often derided for dealing with what seemed to be disparate interests. What, it could be asked, could monetary reform possibly have to do with radiochemistry? But to make sense of Soddy, the question must rather be formulated in the other direction: What fundamental concern did Soddy have that enabled him to embrace holistically a variety of seemingly diverse activities? The answer can be given in a word: energy. And the way in which Soddy dealt with this issue involved him directly with social economics as well as with the social responsibility of scientists.

Heat is the fundamental mechanism in the theory of the earth proposed by James Hutton in 1785. According to Hutton, heat is responsible for the liquefaction of loose debris collected on the ocean floor. Consolidation follows and the newly formed land is raised above the sea by the agency of heat. The expansive nature of heat that causes this elevation of land also accounts for the creation of veins and dykes through the injection of fluid matter into openings in the earth. The activity of heat is intermittent; there are times when it is active, but at other times it is dormant. In another paper I argued that Hutton's concept of this geological heat was an application of his theory of matter in which heat is an immaterial, universally operating force acting in opposition to forces of attraction. This concept of heat was quite different from the popular late eighteenth-century belief that heat was a material substance called caloric. The critics of Hutton repeatedly tried to interpret his heat as if it were caloric. Failing in this they found Hutton a confusion of idle speculation on heat and without theoretical basis. Further, since fire was a major source of caloric and since the already established geological tradition of Vulcanism called for fires within the earth, it was natural that these critics thought of Hutton's theory as being necessarily based on the presence of internal fires and questioned how such fires could exist, disregarding the fact that Hutton rarely mentioned fires and even disclaimed the necessity of fires in the production of heat. The criticisms concerning heat fall into several major groups of which the source of heat in only one. The others include the formation of the whinstone of Scotland and the crystallization of rock in general, the expansive role of heat, the intermittent activity of heat, and the temperature of the earth. Of these the formation of particular kinds of rocks was submitted to experimenal test by Sir James Hall, whose investigations were especially concerned with the effects of the rate of cooling on crystallization and the effects of pressure on the formation of rock. Much of the discussion of Hall's work centred on the experiments, and the theoretical problem about the nature of heat was obscured as a result. It is in the commentary on the other problems noted above that the true situation becomes clear. For this reason a study of these problems is more revealing and constitutes the following.

This article concerns the Atom Train travelling exhibition that the chief body of the British nuclear scientists' movement, the Atomic Scientists' Association (ASA), organized in collaboration with government offices and private industry in 1947–1948. It argues that the exhibition marked an important moment within post-war British nuclear culture where nuclear scientists shared aspects of their nuclear knowledge with the British public, while simultaneously clashing with the interests of the emerging British national security state in the early Cold War.

The aim of this paper is to show how the Greek men of science negotiated a role for their enterprise within the Greek public sphere, from the institution of the modern Greek state in the early 1830s to the first decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on instances where they appeared in public in their official capacity as scientific experts, I describe the rhetorical schemata and the narrative strategies with which Greek science experts engaged the discourses prevalent in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Greece. In the end, my goal is to show how they were neither zealots of modernization nor neutral actors struggling in isolated wastelands. Rather, they appear as energetic agents who used scientific expertise, national ideals and their privileged cultural positions to construct a rhetoric that would further all three. They engaged eagerly and consistently with emerging political views, scientific subjects and cultural and political events, without presenting themselves, or being seen, as doing anything qualitatively different from their peers abroad. Greek scientists cross-contextualized the scientific enterprise, situating it in the space in which they were active.