This paper is based on my M.Sc. dissertation: ‘The Origins of Numerical Taxonomy’ 1985, submitted to the University of Leicester during the tenure of a D.E.S. State Studentship. For this work I drew extensively on interviews with Professors A. J. Cain, G. A. Harrison, R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath. I am very grateful to them for their time, interest and encouragement. Without the indefatigable assistance of Jon Harwood, this paper would never have been finished.

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.

One hundred and twenty-eight years ago in the historic city of Oxford a relatively brief impromptu verbal exchange at a scientific convention occurred. It is still vividly remembered in and out of academia. This so-called ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and the young scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley, a simple and concrete episode, has continued to symbolize dramatically the complex and abstract phenomenon of the conflict between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. while that symbol may be somewhat inaccurate, or its relevance may have shifted from a century ago, it still is a powerful image, one which continues to be an important part of the religious, scientific and rhetorical history of the late Victorian era. Moore recently wrote: ‘No battle of the nineteenth century, save Waterloo, is better known.’ It is, as Altholz put it, ‘one of those historical events the substance and significance of which are clear, but whose specifics are decidedly fuzzy around the edges.’ It is the purpose of this paper to present a full and balanced view of the specific ingredients, permitting a better insight into the event's symbolism and significance.

In his discussion of Robert Hooke's geological ideas, David R. Oldroyd has suggested that ‘Hooke's daring cyclic earth theory may have seemed absurd to his contemporaries’. Following Oldroyd's suggestion, A. J. Turner has claimed that it is entirely understandable that Hooke's geological theories had no followers, ‘for, however plausible in themselves, they were quite implausible in the context of seventeenth century knowledge’. Gordon L. Davies has asserted that Hooke was too advanced for his time and that his geological ‘ideas made no impact on his contemporaries’, and Rhoda Rappaport has said that ‘Hooke's geological work made virtually no impression on the writings of his British contemporaries’.

The story of the end of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh (P.S, E.) in 1783, is linked with that of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (S.A.S.) (1780) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (R.S.E.), both of which were given Royal Charters sealed on 6 May 1783. It is a story which has been admirably told by Steven Shapin. He persuasively argued that the P.S.E. was a casualty of bitter quarrels rooted in local Edinburgh politics, in personal animosities and in disputes about the control of cultural property and intellectual leadership. In all this he was surely correct just as he was in finding the principal actors in this controversy to be: David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan; the Reverend Dr John Walker, Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University; Dr William Cullen, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice-President of the P.S.E.; Mr William Smellie, Printer to the Society of Antiquaries; Henry Home, Lord Kames, S.C.J. and President of the P.S.E.; Sir George Clerk-Maxwell, Vice-President of the P.S.E.; John Robison, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Secretary to the P.S.E.; Edinburgh University's Principal, William Robertson; the Curators of the Advocates Library: Ilay Campbell, Robert Blair, Alexander Abercromby, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Professor of Public Law; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate (1775–August 1783) and M.P. for Midlothian. In a peripheral way, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were probably also involved; so too were Lord Buchan's brothers, Henry and Thomas Erskine, Foxite Whigs who opposed Dundas politically. Henry Erskine displaced Dundas as Lord Advocate in August 1783. After the change of ministry on 18 December 1783 he was ousted, but became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1785. National as well as burgh politics touched these disputes and gave the parties of the Erskines and Dundas and his friends some leverage in London.

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.

It is now twenty years since James Watson published his personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA and triggered the growing scholarly study of the roots of molecular biology. Watson himself was not concerned with the study of nucleic acids before he became directly involved but at least three detailed histories of the early development of molecular biology have subsequently appeared, together with books, papers and reviews from others who took part, or their partisan representatives. Of these three histories, only one does justice to Avery's work. His surviving DNA collaborator, MacLyn McCarty, believes that only Olby in The Path to the Double Helix deals adequately with Avery's contribution.

On the morning of Friday the fourth of December 1863, August Hofmann, professor of chemistry at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, lectured at the College on spectro-chemical analysis to Victoria, the Princess Royal, Princess of Prussia and eldest daughter of the Queen and the severely missed late Prince Consort. This event illustrates the spectacular success that the fledgling science of spectro-chemical analysis enjoyed during the 1860s.

The FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction hypothesis has become well known in connection with Einstein's theory of relativity, and its role in the origin of that theory has been the subject of considerable study. But the origins of the contraction idea itself, and particularly of G. F. FitzGerald's first statement of it in 1889, have attracted much less attention and are surrounded by several misconceptions. The hypothesis has usually been depicted as a rather wild idea put forward without any real theoretical justification simply to explain away the troublesome null result of Michelson and Morley's 1887 ether drift experiment. In the words of Gerald Holton, ‘it has traditionally been called the very paradigm of an ad hoc hypothesis’. H. A. Lorentz, who hit upon the contraction idea independently in 1892, has been credited with giving it some justification in terms of his electron theory, but little or none of this credit has been extended to FitzGerald. His statement of the contraction hypothesis has usually been viewed, in the words of his friend R. T. Glazebrook, as nothing more than ‘the brilliant baseless guess of an Irish genius’.

Interest in contemporary scientific history has concentrated on physics and engineering and its most obvious growth has been in America. By contrast, there has been a relative neglect of the biological sciences, especially in Great Britain. This concern with contemporary scientific history has been an autonomous growth among physical scientists and engineers. There has not yet been any significant development of an historical dimension among modern biologists. Most of those who do study the history of biology are concerned with natural history in the nineteenth century and before, with the largest group concentrating on the Darwinian Revolution. Students of the history of twentieth century biology are just beginning to emerge, but may find themselves uniquely disadvantaged compared with observers of the sciences from earlier centuries, or even of the physical sciences and engineering in the twentieth century, unless certain things are done rather quickly.

The development of systematic mathematics requires writing, and hence a non-literate culture cannot be expected to advance mathematics beyond the stage of numeral words and counting. The hundreds of languages of the Australian aborigines do not seem to have included any extensive numeral systems. However, the common assertions to the effect that ‘Aborigines have only one, two, many’ derive mostly from reports by nineteenth century Christian missionaries, who commonly understood less mathematics than did the people on whom they were reporting. Of course, in recent decades almost all Aborigines have been involved with the dominant European-style culture of Australia, and even those who are not literate have mostly learned to use English-style numerals and to handle money. Similar qualifications should be understood when speaking of any recent primitive culture.

Some of the drawings of the Villard de Honnecourt's manuscript—of which Lassus and Willis gave the first comprehensive editions in the middle of the nineteenth Century—are little technical sketches whose captions do not always make clear the processes that they are intended to explain.

Leonardo's fascination with Archimedes as well as with his mathematics is well known. There are three fairly extensive and eccentric comments in the surviving notebooks: on his military inventions; on his part in an Anglo-Spanish conflict and on his activities, death and burial at the siege of Syracuse. Reti has examined the first of the three, that about the Architronito or steam cannon, mainly considering the origin of the idea for the cannon and its attribution to Archimedes, but with comments on the later influence of Leonardo's ideas. Marshall Clagett has produced the most comprehensive attempt to try to identify Leonardo's sources for the third.

Alfred Waterhouse's ornate Romanesque building at South Kensington, London, has contained the natural history collections of the British Museum since 1881. First opened to the public on Easter Monday, 18 April, in that year, the British Museum (Natural History) (BM(NH)) has become well-known for the excellence of its exhibition galleries, particularly for its dinosaurs, blue whale, and, more recently, for its revolutionary Hall of Human Biology.

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.

Canada as a Neo-Europe is a relatively recent construct, although the people of its first nations, the Indians and Inuit, have been here for some twelve thousand years, since the beginning of the retreat of the last ice sheets. Western science came in a limited way with the first European explorers; Samuel de Champlain left a mariner's astrolabe behind him. The Jesuits followed with their organization and educational institutions, and from the eighteenth century science was established within European Canadian culture.