‘Read until you hear the voices’; so the maxim goes for those who would engage with the Victorians. Let us try with Thomas Henry Huxley:

A great chapter in the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

A generation or so ago, scholarly discussion about the creation of new scientific knowledge in seventeenth-century England was often framed in terms of the respective contributions of scholars and practitioners, the effects of their training and background, the relative importance of the universities compared with London, and of the role of external and internal factors, and so forth. These discourses have now largely been put aside in favour of those emphasizing spatial metaphors and models, which are recognized as powerful conceptual tools for representing the dynamics of complex systems. The role that geographies play in the fostering of creativity and innovation in human systems at both the social and cognitive levels is a subject that is attracting widespread interest.

The introduction of modern Western science into late imperial China naturally involved the creation of new linguistic spaces through the translation of science textbooks and the formation of a modern scientific lexicon, but it also required translation in another, physical, sense through the creation of institutions whereby the new system of practices and ideas could be transmitted. The Shanghai Polytechnic, opened in 1876 under the direction of John Fryer, was promoted as an academy for the ‘extension of learning’; this paper explores the role John Fryer and his Polytechnic played in making space for science in late nineteenth-century China.

From the Renaissance to the seventeenth century the phenomenon of tidal motion constituted one of the principal arguments of scientific debate. Understanding the times for high and low water was of course often essential for navigation, but local variations (which nowadays are attributed to currents, coastal configurations, prevailing winds, seabed shaping and other geographic characteristics) made an inductive approach impractical and precluded the possibility of constructing a universally valid model for predicting these times. Notwithstanding the complexity of the phenomenon and its practical import, however, the early-modern theory of tidal ebb and flow, as clearly emerges from Duhem's analysis, appears to be neither the result of the interpretation of empirical data, nor aimed to their prediction. Rather, the interest in tides was of a theoretical nature and was aroused particularly by their double nature, being at the same time variable and regular, terrestrial and astronomical.

In his classic textbook, The History of Biology, Erik Nordenskiöld suggested that there had existed, throughout the nineteenth century, not one but two distinct forms of plant geography. He designated one of these traditions of inquiry ‘floristic’ plant geography, tracing its origins back to the work of Carl Linnaeus on species and their distributions. The second form Nordenskiöld termed ‘morphological’, by which he meant that its practitioners concentrated upon the study of vegetation rather than flora. He located the origins of this tradition of inquiry within the botanical work of Alexander von Humboldt.

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group of aficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: the Philosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.

In 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants, a heavy volume of nearly six hundred pages in which he presented the results of many years of experiments conducted with his son Francis on the reaction of plants to the influence of light and gravity. His results contradicted the observations and explanations of the same phenomena offered by the German plant physiologist Julius Sachs in his influential Lehrbuch der Botanik (1868, English translation 1875). Darwin wished rather to ‘convert him than any other half-dozen botanies put together’. Sachs, however, regarded Darwin's work with contempt. Taking up the topic in his Vorlesungen über Pflanzenphysiologie in 1882 and taking issue especially with Darwin's experiments on the movement of root radicles in reaction to gravity, he remarked sharply: In such experiments with roots not only is great precaution necessary, but also the experience of years and extensive knowledge of vegetable physiology, to avoid falling into errors, as did Charles Darwin and his son Francis, who, on the basis of experiments which were unskilfully made and improperly explained, came to the conclusion, as wonderful as it was sensational, that the growing point of the root, like the brain of an animal, dominates the various movements in the root.

In the autumn of 1851, on the occasion of the American Institute of New York's annual fair, the Boston chemist and geologist Charles Jackson chose as the subject of his address the ‘Encouragement and Cultivation of the Sciences in the United States’. Playing on popular enthusiasm for science and technology, Jackson rehearsed the wondrous progress of the arts and the role of science in that progress. Science was the ‘Hand-maiden of the Arts’, and most assuredly the ‘maid of honor’, he declared, for science was the ‘progressive power’ which inspired new inventions. These were commonplace assumptions of the time, and surely no one in his audience would have disputed them.

In a 1976 paper, Robert DeKosky wrote ‘William Crookes is a puzzle to historians of latenineteenth century science. Despite his achievements we are forced to ask why he did not accomplish more.’ It is an interesting question; equally interesting is the question that prompts this paper – how did he accomplish so much?

Why some scientists become prolific and successful is a question with both historical and ahistorical dimensions. Among the former are a number of cultural aspects rarely studied by historians. They include the nature of childhood experience, family attitudes, mentoring, and the existence of intellectual and practical support networks in adulthood. Ail are important, but how they contribute to individual success varies with time and place.

Between 1856 and 1858, a group of entrepreneurs and engineers led by the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen J. W. Brett, Charles Bright and E. O. Wildman Whitehouse sought to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland. Their projected cable would be far longer, far more expensive, and far more difficult to lay than any previously attempted; that such an ambitious undertaking was launched and quickly drew financial backing was testimony to the technological enthusiasm of the mid-Victorian era. After many setbacks, the cable was successfully completed early in August 1858. The first messages it carried were met with rapturous excitement on both sides of the Atlantic – making its failure after just a few weeks of fitful service all the more humiliating. Identifying the causes of that failure, and assigning blame for them, became crucial to ensuring the future of transoceanic cable telegraphy. Were the causes of the failure intrinsic to the enterprise, and the vision of a network of transoceanic cables no more than an unrealistic dream? Or did the collapse of the cable result simply from a series of unfortunate and correctable errors? How those questions were answered in the autumn of 1858 would go far toward determining the prospects not only for renewing the Atlantic project, but also for any attempt to extend submarine cables more widely around the world.

Biography and geography do not always sit easily together in historical narrative. With a few notable exceptions, due weight is rarely given to the significance of territorial features in tales of talented individuals. Biographers perhaps play down the untidy contingencies of civic, institutional and domestic spaces in order to present a historiographically coherent portrait of their subject. However, once the vicissitudes of environment and everyday life are taken into account, the identity and accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ begin to merge inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-cultural alliances. For a figure with as formidable a posthumous reputation as T. H. Huxley, such a deconstruction might, at first, seem mundane and of little scholarly value. Yet there is considerable evidence that Huxley was not always successful in his efforts to gain power and influence within the many and varied sites of his working environments. Careful scrutiny of such evidence will show new perspectives on Huxley's complex career in Victorian London. It will also document problems in the construction of the South Kensington suburb as a credible site and fruitful resource for Huxley's remarkably diverse activities in education and science.

The scientific legacy of Karl Pearson and his role as one of the principal architects of the modern theory of mathematical statistics, has generated enough interest to have created an intellectual enterprise on various aspects of his life and work. Despite this interest, Pearson's earliest and most formative statistical work which he delivered in thirty of his thirty-eight Gresham lectures from 17 November 1891 to 11 May 1894 has, to date, been given very little consideration. Pearson is perhaps, best known to historians of science for his first eight Gresham lectures, delivered in London in February and May, 1891, on ‘The Scope and Method of Modern Science’, as these lectures were published with modification in the Grammar of Science in 1892. The only discussions which have emerged from some of the other thirty lectures have come from Egon Pearson and Steve Stigler. As the great bulk of these lectures have not been fully utilized, previous attempts to identify the impetus to his statistical work have been derived either from his teaching of correlation at University College London in 1895–96 or from his third statistical paper which, in part, addresses Francis Galton's work on simple correlation and simple regression. In spite of the emphasis on Galton's work on simple correlation and regression, little attention has been given to Pearson's more innovative work in that paper, which includes his development of the following statistical methods: multiple correlation, multiple regression, the standard error of estimate, the coefficient of variation and the use of determinantal matrix algebra for biometrical methods. This use of a higher form of algebra not only provided a most striking departure from earlier forms and uses of statistics, but it led to an increasing specialization in the emerging discipline of ‘mathematical statistics’.

1831 was a momentous year for Charles Darwin. He passed his BA examination on 22 January, stayed up in Cambridge for two further terms and returned to The Mount, his home in Shrewsbury, in mid-June. On 6 August he left Shrewsbury with Adam Sedgwick for a geological field trip to North Wales, and after his lone traverse over the Harlech Dome returned to The Mount on Monday 29 August to find letters from John Stevens Henslow and George Peacock inviting him to joint HMS Beagle. This geological field trip was crucial for his work on the Beagle. For example, when he began his first geological work of the voyage on Quail Island, he was by that time a competent geologist. Though others have studied the North Wales tour in some detail, there is also another earlier and much briefer episode to consider. Darwin appears to have geologized on his own at Llanymynech in July. The contrast between his first recorded attempts at Llanymynech in July 1831 and then elsewhere in North Wales in August 1831 is most instructive, as his development as a geologist can be followed in his field notes. Retracing his steps today, and comparing his measurements and observations with new ones, throws light on what he might have learnt at different points during that summer.

The outstanding scientific work of Christopher Kelk Ingold (1893–1970) was the focus of considerable discussion, celebration and evaluation during the year of the centenary of his birth. In addition to understanding his prolific and highly original scientific output as a pioneer in the application of physical methods to organic chemistry and, indeed, as a founder of physical organic chemistry, it is also important to examine other aspects of Ingold's career, in particular his role in shaping the institutional context in which he developed his work. From 1930 until his death, Ingold was attached to a major international centre, the Chemistry Department of University College London. From 1937 to 1961, as its Head and Director of Laboratories, continuing the policies of his predecessor on chemical education and the organization of research, he developed a very distinctive chemistry department.

Very few historians have so far turned their attention to the history of chemical engineering, a discipline which impinges on aspects of industrial life as diverse as the manufacture of consumer goods and the generation of nuclear power. However, a number of practising and retired chemical engineers have produced accounts of the late nineteenth-century beginnings and subsequent development of chemical engineering. Their work has set the scene for more recent papers by two academic historians, Colin Divall and James F. Donnelly. There are two particular issues which are frequently discussed, and about which there is a general consensus in this body of work: the origins of academic chemical engineering, and the ways in which its development in the United States differed from that in Europe. In this paper I shall cast doubt on the now conventional picture of these two aspects of the history of chemical engineering.

Anyone reading the literature on the history of graphs will soon realize that the use of graphie displays of any type was really quite unusual until the mid-ninetenth century and that those scientists who did make use of them are often familiar to us as creative thinkers in their own fields of endeavour. A ternary diagram (also known as a triangular diagram) is a particular type of graph which consists of an equilateral triangle in which a given plotted point represents the relative proportions (a, b, c) of three end-members (A, B and C), generally expressed as percentages and constrained by a + b + c = 100%. It has long been used to portray sample composition in terms of three constituents, or an observed colour in terms of three primary colours, because it is a convenient means of representing a three-component System in a planar projection, rather than as an isometric, or similar, view of a three-dimensional space. Recent papers suggest that its use is not as familiar to some statisticians as are other commonly used forms of graph. For example, although it was cited by Peddle in 1910 and more recently by Dickinson, it is not discussed in modern texts on statistical graphies nor in the key papers on the history of graphs. However, beginning with studies of colour-mixing in the eighteenth century, it has subsequently become widely used, particularly in geology, physical chemistry and metallurgy. In this paper, I attempt to document its gradual uptake as a standard method of data display and some of the scientific advances which its use has facilitated.

The culture of science is deeply influenced and conditioned by the socio-political realities of both time and locale. Pre-colonial India, for example, was no tabula rasa. It had a vigorous tradition in at least the realms of mathematics, astronomy and medicine. But gradual colonization made a big dent. It brought forth a massive cultural collision which influenced profoundly the cognitive and material existence of both the colonizer and the colonized.