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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, roughly two hundred expeditions set out for what is now the Canadian Arctic, from its boundary with Alaska in the West, along the northern shore of Canada and including the Arctic archipelago between that shore and the pole, to the marine boundary with Danish Greenland in the East. For more than half a century, these expeditions were little concerned with Canada as a political entity; after all, it had not yet been truly created as a nation. Besides, science was a major part of the mandate of many of the Arctic expeditions, almost half of which achieved significant scientific results; and science, while partly a national activity, was also a trans-national one. John Franklin's last expedition, made famous by disaster, had, typically, been largely motivated by scientific curiosity; the resolution of geomagnetic questions loomed large in Franklin's instructions.