The expert in the early modern period was frequently looked upon with suspicion. Though expertise was associated with specialized knowledge and skill, it was also associated with cunning, deception and social climbing. Indeed, such knowledge threatened well-defined and time-honoured social and disciplinary boundaries. This was certainly the case with practical mathematics, which was considered by many to be an inferior grade of knowledge, especially when compared with natural philosophy and theology. This spawned numerous attempts to elevate the status of practical mathematics and to lend legitimacy to its practitioners. This article focuses on one such attempt, that of an early sixteenth-century French cosmographer–explorer–poet named Pierre Crignon. Crignon participated in voyages of exploration and was renowned as a cosmographer and navigator, but his contemporaries perhaps best knew him as a poet. The paper examines how Crignon attempted to bring together and legitimate the disparate forms of his expertise as a navigator, cosmographer, humanist poet and theologian through the multivalent medium of his poetry, and in particular through a poem comparing the Virgin Mary to the astrolabe.

This paper sketches how late seventeenth-century Dutch anatomists used printed publications to advertise their anatomical preparations, inventions and instructional technologies to an international clientele. It focuses on anatomists Frederik Ruysch (1638–1732) and Lodewijk de Bils (1624–69), inventors of two separate anatomical preparation methods for preserving cadavers and body parts in a lifelike state for decades or centuries. Ruysch's and de Bils's publications functioned as an ‘advertisement’ for their preparations. These printed volumes informed potential customers that anatomical preparations were aesthetically pleasing and scientifically important but did not divulge the trade secrets of the method of production. Thanks to this strategy of non-disclosure and advertisement, de Bils and Ruysch could create a well-working monopoly market of anatomical preparations. The ‘advertising’ rhetorics of anatomical publications highlight the potential dangers of equating the growth of print culture with the development of an open system of knowledge exchange.

This article examines the text of Principia Mathematica to discover the extent to which Newton's claims about his own contribution to it were justified. It is argued that for polemical reasons the General Scholium, written twenty-six years after the first edition, substantially misrepresented the methodology of the main body of the text. The article discusses papers of Wallis, Wren and Huygens that use the third law of motion as set out by Newton in Book 1. It also argues that Newton's use of induction is quite different from and subtler than the ‘logical’ and ‘probabilistic’ notions of induction discussed and then rejected by a number of twentieth-century philosophers.

The paper describes an episode in New Zealand science commonly referred to as the moa-hunter debate. In the 1870s the geologist and curator of the Canterbury Museum Julius Haast put forward a proposal that a race distinct from the indigenous Maori hunted the giant flightless birds known as moa to extinction. James Hector, director of the New Zealand Geological Survey and manager of the New Zealand Institute, rejected this proposal and challenged Haast in what would become a bitter fight. Because moa remains in the form of semi-fossilized bones, eggshells and occasionally preserved feathers and skin were important in the debate, the paper will use the analytical method of actor-network theory (ANT) to reopen it. The paper thus provides an opportunity to study the strengths and weaknesses of ANT as a form of analysis. This analysis emphasizes a number of interesting points about the moa-hunter debate, including the ability of human actors to manipulate the meaning of common terms in order to create new theories, in this case Haast's theory of an earlier indigenous race in New Zealand. Though dismissed at the time, this was a belief that has lasted in alternative forms to the present.

Among various case studies addressing the reception of relativity, very few deal with Portugal at either the international or the national level. The national literature on the topic has mainly concentrated on the reactions to relativity of the Portuguese mathematical community. The absence of Portuguese astronomers alongside Eddington during the 1919 expedition to Principe, then a Portuguese island, has been implicitly equated with the astronomical community's lack of interest in the event. In reception studies dealing with general relativity, analysis has tended to focus on the physics and mathematics communities, less on the astronomers. Given that relativity was born at the interface of physics, mathematics and astronomy, reactions of members of these scientific communities depended on differences in shared traditions, values, problems and expectations, as well as on individual practitioners' idiosyncrasies. This paper addresses the contributions of the overlooked Portuguese astronomical community, evaluates the actions and reactions of its members to the expedition and assesses their role in the process of appropriation of relativity.