Francis Bacon's concept of the ‘vexations of art’ (vexationes artium) entailed experimentation as an intervention into nature for the purpose of extracting its secrets. Although the standard edition of Bacon's works by Spedding, Ellis and Heath and the new Oxford edition by Graham Rees translate the phrase vexationes artium as the ‘vexations of art’, a significant number of scholars, translators and editors from the seventeenth century to the present have read Bacon's Latin as the ‘torment’ or ‘tortures of art’. Here I discuss these latter interpretations and speculate on the reasons for their association of the term with experimentation. While it may not be possible to say with certainty what Bacon meant by ‘vexation’, the context of his thought, the rich set of metaphors on which he drew and the interpretations of dozens of scholars over four centuries would seem to favour assigning a robust, interventionist meaning to vexare.

It has long been noted that towards the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to use its instruments of censorship – the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books – to prosecute magic with increased vigour. These developments are often deemed to have had important consequences for the development of modern science in Italy, for they delimited areas of legitimate investigation of the natural world. Previous accounts of the censorship of magic have tended to suggest that the Church as an institution was opposed to, and sought to eradicate, the practice of magic. I do not seek to contest the fact that ecclesiastical censors prosecuted various magical and divinatory practices with greater enthusiasm at this time, but I suggest that in order to understand this development more fully it is necessary to offer a more complex picture of the Church. In this article I use the case of the Neapolitan magus Giambattista Della Porta to argue that during the course of the century the acceptable boundaries of magical speculation became increasingly clearly defined. Consequently, many practices and techniques that had previously been of contested orthodoxy were categorically defined as heterodox and therefore liable to prosecution and censorship. I argue, however, that this development was not driven by the Church asserting a ‘traditional’ hostility towards magic, but was instead the result of one particular faction within the Church embedding their conception of orthodox philosophical investigation of the natural world within the machinery of censorship.

This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices.

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy of Megatherium were shaped by the arrival in London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genus Glyptodon by Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible.

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge.

The modern concept of extinction emerged in the Victorian period, though its chief proponent is seldom remembered today. Alfred Newton, for four decades the professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge, was an expert on rare and extinct birds as well as on what he called ‘the exterminating process'. Combining traditional comparative morphology with Darwinian natural selection, Newton developed a particular sense of extinction that helped to shape contemporary, and subsequent, animal protection. Because he understood extinction as a process to be studied scientifically, and because he made that, rather than animal cruelty, the focus of animal protection, Newton provides an important window onto the relationship between science and sentiment in this period. Newton's efforts to bring the two into line around the issue of human-caused extinction reveal an important moment in which the boundaries between science and sentiment, and between those who did and those who did not have the authority to speak for nature, were up for grabs.