When Vestiges 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 the Vestiges argument 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 his On 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, praising Vestiges to its author and condemning it to its critics’.

On 30 April, 1897, J. J. Thomson announced the results of his previous four months' experiments on cathode rays. The rays, he suggested, were negatively charged subatomic particles. He called the particles ‘corpuscles’. They have since been re-named ‘electrons’ and Thomson has been hailed as their ‘discoverer’. Contrary to the accounts of most later writers, I show that this discovery was not the outcome of a concern with the nature of cathode rays which had occupied Thomson since 1881 and had shaped the course of his experiments during the period 1881–1897. An examination of his work shows that he paid scant attention to cathode rays until late 1896.

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.

So much of the history of science has been written from the point of view of the scientist or the proto-scientist that it may be salutary for the modern reader occasionally to consider how science and its early practitioners were viewed from the outside. We must not be too surprised if a pioneering activity performed by controversial agents was misunderstood or misrepresented and if what emerges is, therefore, sometimes less of a portrait than a caricature. We are concerned here much less with what natural philosophers actually did than what they were thought to have done, or what they were thought to stand for. The image is sometimes more influential than the reality. Considering that the period to be studied is one of major political and social unrest and that the principal spokesman, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), had made his reputation mainly in the arena of parliamentary politics, we can anticipate rather more polemic than dispassionate argument. In the formation of public opinion a colourful exaggeration or even an occasional sneer are often more effective than the objective exposition of a case. The spectacles through which Burke looked at his world sometimes magnified and often distorted, but they produced a view of knowledge and society shared by many of his contemporaries and of considerable subsequent influence.

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.

Letter writing played an especially important role in Charles Darwin's scientific career. Like all scientists, he often needed to communicate with his colleagues, but Darwin's needs were unusual. In the first place, he lived for only short periods in centres where conversation with other scientists was possible. During his student days in Edinburgh and Cambridge he enjoyed personal contacts with university professors and other naturalists associated with the university communities; however, from 1831–1836 he sailed on the Beagle voyage. After his return he lived in London, the centre of British science, but only until 1842 when, partly due to ill-health, he withdrew to the rural village of Down in nearby Kent where he spent the rest of his life. Darwin was not totally isolated in Down. From time to time friends and colleagues paid visits, often to consult about scientific questions. Furthermore, Darwin travelled to London more frequently than has sometimes been supposed. In addition to occasional lengthier visits recorded in his Diary, he also made one-day trips, carefully recording his expenses in his account book. The record of his account book shows that during the early years in Down, he travelled to London more than a dozen times a year, though as he grew older the number of trips declined. Even during the early years, he still depended on the mail for much of the time to keep him in touch with fellow researchers.

André-Marie Ampère's contributions to electrodynamics came at a late stage in an unconventional career. In 1820, he had reached the age of forty-five and had not as yet done any systematic research in physics. As a member of the mathematics section of the Académie des Sciences, his only significant contributions to the physical sciences had been some constructive criticisms of Fresnel's wave theory of light and three memoirs on chemical classification and gas theory. Meanwhile, his longstanding interests in metaphysics and epistemology had resulted in pointed methodological and philosophical attitudes which both motivated and structured his subsequent work in electrodynamics. Not surprisingly, events during the first few months of Ampère's research included many unplanned and unexpected encounters as this wildly enthusiastic theoretician grappled for the first time with the recalcitrant complexity of actual experimentation in an uncharted new domain.

The British Psychological Society having established a ‘Philosophy and History’ section, a fresh look at the nature of the History of Psychology is called for. In this paper, I would like to make a contribution to this by raising some conundrums which have yet to be adequately addressed. First, though, what has happened in the History of Psychology so far? Psychologists have been writing histories of their discipline since the turn of the century; Baldwin's History of Psychology appeared in 1913, for example, and the first volume of G. S. Brett's trilogy of the same title in 1912, a year which also saw Dessoir's Outlines of the History of Psychology translated into English. This early work was clearly aimed at providing a respectable genealogy for the nascent discipline; only about a fifth of Baldwin's work actually deals with experimental or empirical Psychology dating from later than the mid-nineteenth century, while Brett treats scientific approaches virtually as a coda to a survey of the history of the philosophy of mind. Psychology is presented as the legitimate heir to the main western philosophical tradition, sired on it, so to speak, by physiologists such as Helmholtz, Muller and Broca. In 1929, E. G. Boring published the first edition of his A History of Experimental Psychology, which dominated the field for decades along with Gardner Murphy's Historical Introduction of Modern Psychology of 1928, a lighter weight work but with a somewhat broader range, which served as an introductory text. Both went into subsequent editions, the latter as recently as 1972 (much enlarged). The series The History of Psychology in Autobiography, begun in 1930 and now in its seventh volume (1980), contains professional autobiographies by the ageing eminent of varying levels of self-disclosure, wit and informative value. It is not, however, until the 1960s that a self-conscious sub-discipline calling itself ‘History of Psychology’ emerges within Psychology, being pioneered by the late R. I. Watson in the United States. New histories begin appearing, including Kantor's very positivistic The Scientific Evolution of Psychology Vol. 1 of 1963 and Hearnshaw's A Short History of British Psychology of 1964. In 1965, the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences was started, formally signalling the arrival of the new sub-discipline on the scene. Subsequent events warrant a more critical appraisal.

The recognition of Gregor Mendel's achievement in his study of hybridization was signalled by the ‘rediscovery’ papers of Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich Tschermak. The dates on which these papers were published are given in Table 1. The first of these—De Vries ‘Comptes rendus paper—was in French and made no mention of Mendel or his paper. The rest, led by De Vries’ Berichte paper, were in German and mentioned Mendel, giving the location of his paper. It has long been accepted that the first account of Mendel's work in English was given by the Cambridge zoologist, William Bateson, to an audience of Fellows of the Royal Horticultural Society in London on 8 May, 1900. This is based on two sources: the paper ‘Problems of Heredity as a Subject for Horticultural Investigation’, published in the Society's journal later that year and stated as ‘Read 8 May, 1900’, and Beatrice Bateson's account of the event over a quarter of a century later. Of the paper which her husband gave on that occasion she wrote:

He had already prepared this paper, but in the train on his way to town to deliver it, he read Mendel's actual paper on peas for the first time. As a lecturer he was always cautious, suggesting rather than affirming his own convictions. So ready was he however for the simple Mendelian law that he at once incorporated it into his lecture.

After Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff had passed away on 1 March 1911, his pupil Charles Marinus van Deventer (1860–1931) wrote a very personal ‘in memoriam’ in the Dutch literary periodical De Gids, pointing out that van't Hoff had merely been interested in scientific facts, not in the people discovering these facts. Van't Hoff considered the study of the history of chemistry, although by no means uncongenial, a matter of little importance. He once even said: ‘To me historical research appears to be appropriate for a chemist in the decline of life, when he no longer creates professional ideas, and when the laboratory has become a burden to him’. Although van Deventer had studied physical chemistry at van't Hoff's Amsterdam laboratory and had been his assistant from 1885 until 1893, he disagreed with this verdict. Van Deventer was not only a capable physical chemist, he was also an active member of the Tachtigers, a circle of Dutch poets who around 1880 brought about a renewal in Dutch literature. He took a special interest in Greek philosophy. He did not graduate with van't Hoff, but with his colleague Jan Willem Gunning (1827–1900). His thesis was not based on physical-chemical, but on historical research: Schetsen uit de Geschiedenis van de Scheikunde (‘Sketches from the history of chemistry’; 13 December 1884). From 1922 to 1923 he lectured on the history of chemistry at Utrecht University. His fascinating lectures were published as Grepen uit de Historie der Chemie (‘Choices from the history of chemistry’; 1924). This work reveals his particular interest in the development of chemical concepts.

Two analogies are at the foundation of editions of writings of scientists, technologists and physicians. Both are exemplified in the collection of ‘works’, texts of printed finished versions of contributions. The literary analogy is that of authorship, of the creation of a significant assemblage of words and other symbols. Assemblages of monographs and articles of a scientist are functionally no different than comparable arrays of the writings of theologians, philosophers, poets, novelists and historians.

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.

‘In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God’. These words—taken out of their theological context—epitomize a common attitude among historians during most of Western history. By definition, there was no history before the advent of writing. Truly, for history, ‘in the beginning was the Word’ and, for nearly six millenia for the historian, ‘the Word was God’. As a consequence, words have dominated both the content and the form of historical works, including documentary editions. The close historical identity between reality and the mind and between ideas and words has reinforced the focus on words. There remain today philosophers who argue that thinking can only occur with words. It is not surprising, then, that a verbal conception of documents continues to dominate historical documentary editing. A few years ago, a famous American historian and documentary editor sought to convince me that documents were by definition, verbal.

When did modern science arise? This is a question which has received divergent answers. Some would say that it started in the High Middle Ages (1277), or that it began with th ‘via moderna’ of the fourteenth century. More widespread is the idea that the Italian Renaissance was also the re-birth of the sciences. In general, Copernicus is then singled out as the great revolutionary, and the ‘scientific revolution’ is said to have taken place during the period from Copernicus to Newton. Others would hold that the scientific revolution started in the seventeenth century and that it covered the period from Galileo to Newton. Sometimes a second scientific revolution is said to have occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.), a revolution which should be considered as great as the first one.