It is hard to think of a better subject for the exercise of retrospective analysis with which we are here concerned than Robert Boyle, the leading British scientist of his day, and arguably the most significant before Newton. A prolific and influential author, Boyle was lionized in his time both for his scientific achievement and for his piety and philanthropy. Of late, he has been the subject of attention from a variety of viewpoints which, as we shall see, raises the issue of how he is best understood. In particular, I want to argue that, for all his eminence, there are complications about Boyle's personality that cry out for scrutiny, and it is on the implications of these that I will dwell in the latter stages of my paper.

Boyle was born into one of the most privileged aristocratic families in England. His father, Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, was Lord High Treasurer of Ireland before the Civil War, and Robert, the youngest – and, as he himself claimed, favourite – son, was brought up in an opulent, privileged setting, surrounded by servants and with an entrée at the royal court. His elder brothers were suave and active figures, only too ready to be involved in the fighting of the Civil War – in which one, Viscount Kinalmeaky, was killed, though two others, Lords Dungarvan and Broghill, survived to go on to high state office under both Cromwell and Charles II. This background undoubtedly had a significant influence on Boyle, giving him an aristocratic demeanour to which his contemporaries almost automatically deferred. It also made him familiar with the mindless social milieu of landed society, in which it was all too easy (in Boyle's own words) to ‘squander away a whole afternoone in tatling of this Ladys Face & tother Lady's Clothes; of this Lords being Drunke & that Lord's Clap; in telling how this Gentleman's horse outrun that other's Mare’.

I. Reputed shortcomings of Descartes as philosopher of science.

II ‘Knowledge’ in mathematics and in physics. The ‘ontological’ postulates of Descartes's philosophy and philosophy of physics.

III. The ‘foundations of dynamics’: ‘Newton's First Law of Motion’ and its status.

IV. Descartes's conception of ‘hypothesis’: the competing claims of the ideal of the a priori in physics and the conception of retroductive inference. (The status of the mechanistic world picture.)

V. Descartes's notion of ‘analysis’. The distinction between ‘procedure’ and ‘inference’. The notion of ‘induction’ and ‘understanding through models’: ‘Snell's Law of Refraction’.

Travelling is an activity closely associated with Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and his circle of students. This article discusses the transformative role of studying nature outdoors (turning novices into naturalists) in eighteenth-century Sweden, using the little-known journeys of Carl Bäck (1760–1776), Sven Anders Hedin (1750–1821) and Johan Lindwall (1743–1796) as examples. On these journeys, through different parts of Sweden in the 1770s, the outdoors was used, simultaneously, as both a classroom and a space for exploration. The article argues that this multifunctional use of the landscape (common within the Linnaean tradition) encouraged a democratization of the consumption of scientific knowledge and also, to some degree, of its production. More generally, the study also addresses issues of how and why science and scientists travel by discussing how botanical knowledge was reproduced and extended ‘on the move’, and what got senior and junior students moving.

‘Hitherto want of accuracy and definiteness have often been brought as a charge against geology, and sometimes only with too much justice’, wrote Archibald Geikie in a review of Sir Roderick Murchison's Siluria (1867). ‘We seem now to be entering, however, upon a new era, when there will be infused into geological methods and speculation, some of the precision of the exact sciences’. Geikie's judgement echoed an appeal made some thirty years earlier by William Hopkins (1793–1866) that the science of geology needed to be ‘elevated’ from a level of ‘indeterminate generalities’ to a rank among the stricter physical sciences. This paper aims to analyse, in the context of broader trends favouring measurement and mathematics in British scientific practice, Hopkins' role in the promotion of dynamical geology as a major new complement to stratigraphical geology such that, for example, in the first edition of Geikie's Textbook of Geology (1882) the dynamical and stratigraphical components each filled 376 pages.

Early in this century, only a few biologists accepted that natural selection was the chief cause of evolution, until the independent calculations of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), Sewall Wright and R. A. Fisher demonstrated that ideal populations subject to Mendel's laws could behave as Darwin had said they would. Evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, a student of Haldane's, has raised the question of why Haldane, who was no naturalist, took up the subject of evolution, and he suggests that the answer may have to do with Haldane's lively interest in religion. In fact Maynard Smith's answer has much more evidence in its favour than he knew.

There was more than one response to the nuclear age. Countering well-documented attitudes of protest and pessimism, Muriel Howorth (1886–1971) models a less examined strain of atomic enthusiasm in British nuclear culture. Believing that the same power within the atomic bomb could be harnessed to make the world a ‘smiling garden of Eden’, she utilized traditionally feminine domains of kitchen and garden in her efforts to educate the public about the potential of the atom and to ‘safeguard’ it on their behalf. Boldly entering an overtly masculine arena in which, as a woman and a layperson, she was doubly an ‘other’, Howorth used a variety of publications, organizations and staged events to interpret atomic science and specifically to address women. Her efforts, dating roughly from 1948 to 1962, preceded but had broad overlaps with official Atoms for Peace programmes, and culminated in the formation of the Atomic Gardening Society in 1960 to promote the cultivation of gamma-irradiated seeds by British gardeners.

The Rev. Dr John Walker was the Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1779 to 1803. Although his time in this position has been addressed by several studies, the previous thirty years that he spent ‘mineralizing’ have been virtually ignored. The situation is similar for many of the well-known mineralogists of the eighteenth century and there is a lack of studies that address how a mineralogist actually became a mineralogist. Using Walker's early career as a guide, this essay seeks to detail the making of an eighteenth-century Scottish mineralogist. The time frame under examination begins with Walker's matriculation at the University of Edinburgh in 1746 and it ends with his being appointed professor in 1779. The first section demonstrates that Walker's early mineralogical education at the Medical School and under William Cullen was closely linked to chemistry. The second section shows how he used chemical characters to classify minerals and to criticize the systems of Linnaeus, Da Costa, Wallerius and Cronstedt. Because Walker needed many ‘fossil’ samples to test the viability of his chemical mineralogy, the final section details how he used tours, patrons and correspondents to build his mineral collection.

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 a plenum formarum in which the range of conceivable diversity of kinds of 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’.

The simple belief that Galileo ‘invented’ dynamics or kinematics was destroyed long ago. Yet there can be no doubt of the revolution in ideas of motion associated with his name. The paper examines some recent work in this field and evaluates the nature and extent of Galileo's contributions.

The Accademia del Cimento in seventeenth-century Florence has traditionally been seen as the first European organization to employ an experimental programme, thus becoming a major participant in the so-called ‘birth of modern experimental science’. Such traditional accounts have also detailed the cultural, political and religious environment of the period that contributed to the Accademia's use of a supposedly atheoretical experimental method. However, despite the merits of such cultural histories, these stories do not portray the full details behind the Accademia's intellectual workings – how knowledge claims were constructed, interpreted and presented by the academicians according to their natural philosophical concerns. It is argued here that such an analysis will provide a more accurate account of the Accademia's activities than existing stories about the birth of an experimental programme or method. By looking past the experimental rhetoric produced by the academicians in their only publication, Saggi di naturali esperienze, we begin to see at play one of the major issues which made up the Accademia's knowledge-making process: the natural philosophical interests of this institution's participants, particularly Borelli, Viviani, Rinaldini and Marsili. Those interests are represented in the Accademia's experiments, including their work concerned with air pressure and the void.

In the first half of the twentieth century, hormones took pride of place as life's master molecules and the endocrinologist took precedence over the geneticist as the scientist offering the means to control life. But, as with molecular genetics and biotechnology today, the status of endocrinology was not based solely on contemporary scientific and medical practices. To a high degree it was also reliant on expectations or visions of what endocrinologists would soon be able to do. Inspired by the approach of social studies of techno-scientific expectations, the aim of this article is to explore some of the great expectations connected to the development of endocrinology in the 1930s. The analysis is based on popular books written by the American physician and endocrinologist Louis Berman. The paper argues that Berman thought not only that it was perfectly possible to understand human nature through hormone analysis but that endocrinologists would be able to control, design and ‘improve’ humans by using hormone replacement therapy. Furthermore, in contrast to most of the eugenics of his time, Berman suggested that the whole population of the world should be improved. As a political activist he wanted to contribute to the development of new human beings, ‘ideal normal persons’, thereby reaching an ‘ideal society’. That HRT could involve risks was something that he seems not to have taken into account.

This paper uses the work of John Richardson, an eighteenth-century brewing theorist, to explore the view that physical quantities, though they appear ‘natural’ or ‘given’, are actually contingent entities constructed to serve particular aims. It focuses on the pounds-per-barrel extract, a brewery-specific quantity which, in a reversal of the familiar position, seems self-evidently constructed to the general reader yet came to be accepted as ‘natural’ among its users. Central to Richardson's work in achieving this acceptance was an instrument, the saccharometer, which, by providing measurements of the quantity, legitimated it. Richardson presented both instrument and quantity as tailored to serving the particular needs of his fellow brewers, at the same time emphasizing their separateness from parallel work in distillery assessment, which had made Richardson's innovation possible but now threatened his projected consensus. Richardson's overall project encompassed the direct proportionation of material costs, retail prices and Excise duties to extract values as defined by the saccharometer, which he sought to monopolize. The scheme was not wholly successful, yet Richardson's quantity remained in brewery use into modern times. The end result, I contend, shows how a quantity, by becoming naturalized, may survive the loss of its initial theoretical underpinning.

A significant but neglected theme in the history of British science in the nineteenth century is the funding of institutional research. The subscription to the ‘great battery’ at the Royal Institution in 1808 and 1809 provides the first instance of named individuals prepared to commit themselves to the provision of apparatus to be used for research in the new field of electrochemistry. This paper analyses the subscribers who were deemed to be ‘enlightened’ and whom Humphry Davy subsequently described as ‘a few zealous cultivators and patrons of science’. Using information from the subscription list, a distinction is made between the individual subscriptions pledged and the sums actually paid. In contextualizing the subscription, insights are provided into the Royal Society, the contemporary scientific community and the politics of metropolitan science. The voltaic subscription represents an early example of the repercussions of the nature of research funding for institutional finances and governance.

This paper focuses on the role played by Domenico Marotta, director of the ISS (Higher Institute of Health) for over twenty-five years, in the development of twentieth-century Italian biomedicine. We will show that Marotta aimed to create an integrated centre for research and production able to interact with private industry. To accomplish this, Marotta shifted the original mission of the ISS, from public health to scientific research. Yet Mussolini's policy turned most of the ISS resources towards controls and military tasks, opposing Marotta's aspiration. By contrast, in the post-war years Marotta was able to turn the ISS into the most important Italian biomedical research institution, where research and production fruitfully cohabited. Nobel laureates, such as Ernst Chain, and future Nobel laureates, such as Daniel Bovet, were hired. The ISS built up an integrated research and production centre for penicillin and antibiotics. In the 1960s, Marotta's vision was in accord with the new centre-left government. However, he pursued his goals by ruling the ISS autocratically and beyond any legal control. This eventually led to his downfall and prosecution. This also marked the decline of the ISS, intertwined with the weakness of the centre-left government, who failed to achieve structural reforms and couple the modernization of the country with the democratization of its scientific institutions.

With the recent advent of systems biology, developmental biology is taking a new turn. Attempts to create a ‘digital embryo’ are prominent among systems approaches. At the heart of these systems-based endeavours, variously described as ‘in vivo imaging’, ‘live imaging’ or ‘in toto representation’, are visualization techniques that allow researchers to image whole, live embryos at cellular resolution over time. Ultimately, the aim of the visualizations is to build a computer model of embryogenesis. This article examines the role of such visualization techniques in the building of a computational model, focusing, in particular, on the cinematographic character of these representations. It asks how the animated representation of development may change the biological understanding of embryogenesis. By situating the animations of the digital embryo within the iconography of developmental biology, it brings to light the inextricably entwined, yet shifting, borders between the animated, the living and the computational.

In 1859 Charles Darwin in chapter nine of the Origin of Species showed how he had calculated that the age of the Weald was three hundred million years and that consequently the age of the earth was considerably greater than that. Darwin of course needed such a long period of time for the process of evolution by natural selection to occur. Arguments which showed that the earth could not be that old would therefore cast serious doubt on his theory. Such views were advanced in 1862 by William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow. He specifically challenged the result of Darwin's calculation of the age of the Weald by arguing that the sun could not have emitted its heat and light for that length of time. The consequences of this assertion for the biological and geological sciences for the remainder of the nineteenth century have already been delineated by Burchfield. What I wish to do in this paper is to show that the theoretical basis of Thomson's 1862 assertion had not been specifically developed as a response to Darwin, but that it was a consequence of the formulation of the first two laws of thermodynamics. I shall also show that Thomson's work was not done in isolation but that the question of the maintenance of solar energy was a serious concern of a number of physicists who had formulated the laws of thermodynamics.

This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity.

In 1946, the British biochemist Joseph Needham returned from a four-year stay in China. Needham scholars have considered this visit as a revelatory period that paved the way for his famous book series Science and Civilization in China (SCC). Surprisingly, however, Needham's actual time in China has remained largely unstudied over the last seventy years. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham travelled throughout Free China to promote cooperation between British and Chinese scientists to contain the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. By rediscovering Needham's peregrinations, this paper re-examines the origins of his fascination for China. First, it contests the widely held idea that this Chinese episode is quite separate and different from Needham's first half-life as a leftist scientist. Second, it demonstrates how the political and philosophical commitments he inherited from the social relations of science movement, and his biochemical research, shaped his interest in China's past. Finally, this paper recounts these forgotten years to reveal their implications for his later pursuits as historian of science and as director of the natural-science division of UNESCO. It highlights how, while in China, Needham co-constituted the philosophical tenets of his scientific programme at UNESCO and the conceptual foundations of his SCC.