At the centre of nineteenth-century imperial authority sat the British Museum, which set the standard for discourse about natural history. This paper examines the meaning of those standards, exploring their important but little-understood role in ending the nineteenth-century species debate. The post-Reform Bill political assault on the authority of the British Museum is examined in the light of the ‘species problem’, and a surprising solution by John Edward Gray, keeper of the natural history collection, is seen as both a mediation and a closure of disputes over the meaning of species and the competence of naturalists. Gray's strategic solution – revealed in his copious notes on the parliamentary commissions investigating the affairs of the BM – embodied competence in institutional discourse and set the stage for the supposed ‘cynical’ definition of species later adopted in Darwin's Origin of Species, namely that species are merely what competent naturalists say they are.

This essay examines Jane Marcet's 1806 Conversations on Chemistry in the context of a newly emerging ideology of science. As part of this emergence, a new public for chemistry had to be formed and clearly demarcated from that of ‘public men’ of science. Although this essay examines Marcet's relation to Humphry Davy's public lectures on chemistry, it focuses on the encouragement she received from the highly intellectual Geneva elite, to whom she was related. Comparing her work to the influential Bibliothèque britannique founded by members of this elite, it asks why a group of patrician intellectuals would want to cultivate women's interest in chemistry and encourage the popularization of science in the aftermath of a revolution which threatened their national identity and power. It suggests that the answer may lie in the recourse to science to establish moral and political authority in the aftermath of this very revolution.

The narratives of stratigraphy in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were greatly augmented by new rock exposures arising from railway construction. Leading geologists quickly registered this vast new array of potential scientific knowledge and pressed the BAAS and, later, HM Government, to regularize the recording of ‘railway sections’. Artists simultaneously found in these sometimes vast rock cuttings a rich source of subliminal imagery. A systematic examination of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society reveals country-wide reporting and recording of railway sections. Leading geologists were among the contributors, but so too were railway engineers, demonstrating a growing alliance of practical and theoretical geology. Nor were leading geologists strangers to early rail travel. In the 1840s they ‘expressed’ to annual meetings of the British Association in all its varied provincial venues. William Buckland even gave classes on geology whilst travelling by train, in order better to display the successive rock strata to his students.

Ours is no coasting voyage by the sunny shores of some well-havened bay; we steer across the undiscovered oceans of truth, with compasses in need of correction, under the canopy of cloud and darkness which involves the origin of things.

J. Phillips, Esq., part of his presidential address to the Geological Society, 1859See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society (hereafter QJGS) (1859), 15, p. lxi.

Recent studies in nineteenth-century spiritualism have illuminated the social practice of the occult in various cultural contexts. Richard Noakes in his latest study on telegraphy and the occult in Victorian England, for instance, shows how the world of spiritualism and the world of technology were welded together by Victorian engineering schemes and money.R. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an occult art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the diffusion of electricity to the other world’, BJHS (1999), 32, 421–59. This paper looks at another culture of occult practice which has often been neglected by historians of science: the role of spiritism in the making of German experimental psychology. Based on a debate focusing on the German astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zöllner and the American medium Henry Slade, I will show how spiritistic experiments were situated in the emerging contexts of scientific practice, laboratories and disciplines.For a more external approach on Zöllner see C. Meinel, Karl Friedrich Zöllner und die Wissenschaftskultur der Gründerzeit, Berlin, 1991. ‘Spiritismus’ in German and ‘spiritualism’ in English refer to the study of ghosts. ‘Spiritualismus’ in German refers to the metaphysical and theological dimension of the spiritual. This study will also take a close look at the perception of spiritistic mediums as instruments by experimenters such as Zöllner.This perception dates back to the 18th century. S. Schaffer, ‘Deus et Machina’, La Lettre de la Maison française (1997), 9, 30–58. On the perception of experimental subjects as machines in Victorian culture see A. Winter, Mesmerized, Chicago, 1998, Chapter 3.

Things were in control and then they were not and then they were.

Sally Bushell, Under the Breadfruit TreeS. Bushell, Under the Breadfruit Tree, Cambridge, 1997, 22.

Throughout the nineteenth century evolution theory and the possibility of reconciling it with Christian doctrine was a matter for free discussion among Catholics, but suddenly towards the end of the century the attitude of the Roman doctrinal authorities hardened. Nothing public was done but theologians, upon hearing that their theses had been examined in Rome and judged to be untenable, began to withdraw their books from sale, make public retractions and cease to discuss the subject. What processes lay behind these events, and who were the main persons responsible for what was effectively a U-turn in the official church attitude of Pope Leo XIII's pontificate, are questions that have been unanswerable until now. However, in 1998 the archives of the Holy Office, now renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, were opened to scholars so that it has become possible to clarify these particular mysteries. This article does that for the first time, and the story it has to tell provides insights into the dynamics of cultural and intellectual interactions within the Catholic Church community and with the rest of the world. This Catholic story should be seen as something more than a struggle that took place within the ranks of the Catholic Church: it was an episode in the history of science and its cultural relations in the modern world.