Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), a series of lively dialogues on optics, was a landmark in the popularization of Newtonian philosophy. In this essay I shall explore Algarotti's sociocultural world, his aims and ambitions, and the meaning he attached to his own work. In particular I shall focus on Algarotti's self-promotional strategies, his deployment of gendered images and his use of popular philosophy within the broader cultural and experimental campaign for the success of Newtonianism. Finally, I shall suggest a radical reading of the dialogues, reconstructing the process that brought them to their religious condemnation. What did Newtonianism mean to Algarotti? In opposition to mainstream apologetic interpretations, he seems to have framed the new experimental methodology in a sensationalistic epistemology derived mainly from Locke, pointing at a series of subversive religious and political implications. Due to the intervention of religious authorities Algarotti's radical Newtonianism became gradually less visible in subsequent editions and translations. It is only through the study of the first – clandestine – edition of the dialogues that one can begin reconstructing the meaning of Algarotti's experiments (real and fictional) and his cultural battle for a regenerated Europe.

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the scene of several lively debates concerning the structure of the Earth. Though the ideas of groups like the ‘Wernerians’ and the ‘Huttonians’ have received due attention, little has been done to explicate the practice of mineralogy as it existed in the decades before the debates. To dig deeper into the eighteenth-century subject that formed the foundation of nineteenth-century geology in Scotland, this essay concentrates on Rev. Dr John Walker, the University of Edinburgh's Professor of Natural History (1779–1803). In pursuing this topic, it builds on an earlier BJHS article in which I excavated his early career as a mineralogist (1749–79). After first addressing a few historiographical points and the provenance of the student manuscripts upon which this study is based, I explain the method that Walker used to arrange minerals. I then move on to show that, like his younger attempts at mineralogical classification, his mature system was based predominantly upon chemistry. This sets the stage for the last half of the essay where I reconstruct the mineralogical system that Walker taught to the hundreds of students who sat in his natural history lectures from 1782 until 1800. I then conclude with a few observations about the relevance of his mineralogy to the scientific community of late eighteenth-century Edinburgh.

This paper examines the usefulness of the category ‘interest’ in the history of technology through a case study of the failed attempt to introduce atmospheric railway traction in Britain in the 1840s. It argues for a reflective deployment of the term in question, sensitive to contemporary usages. A schematic typology of railway ‘interests’ shows just how various these were. Financial interests, for example, were not the same as professional ones; or an investor might feel the pull of contrary interests, depending on whether she was checking her dividends or taking a train. The history of atmospheric traction demonstrates the interlocking of railway ‘interests’, and their utility in explaining the success or failure of railway technologies. As might be expected, determinism, whether technological or ‘social’, does not answer the case. ‘Interest’ relations are contingent, and so must be understood the failure of the atmospheric railway.

In 1637 a Frenchman named Noël Duret (Durret) published a book in Paris that referred to the heliocentric Copernican system. In 1660 an Ottoman scholar named Ibrāhīm Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkireci translated the book into Arabic. For more than three centuries this manuscript was buried in an Ottoman archive in Istanbul until it resurfaced at the beginning of the 1990s. The discovery of the Arabic text has necessitated a re-evaluation of the history of early modern Arabic natural philosophy, one that takes into account the intellectual context of Ibrāhīm Efendi and the overarching trends in the world of Sufi mysticism. These trends were reflected in art, literature, philosophy and natural philosophy. Using philological and cultural clues, as well as Ibrāhīm Efendi's own words, we can attempt deductions about why, how and for what purposes Ibrāhīm Efendi chose Duret's book for his project.

Edinburgh has long been recognized as one important place where early glacial theory was promoted and debated. This paper, rather than attend to the longer-term development of glacial theory, focuses on the ways in which the theory was assessed, disseminated and received in and through the scientific culture of early Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh's scientific and educational societies, science journals, newspapers and field sites are brought to view through examining their engagement with, and use of, early glacial theory. Tracking the theory's passage across a range of spaces bound up with the promotion of geology in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh signals relations between local geological endeavour and other sorts of scientific and cultural work. Particular, though not exclusive, attention is given to practices more readily defined as ‘popular’.

This paper examines Robert Willis's science of ‘mechanism’, its relation to the later mechanics textbooks of William Whewell, and its promotion as the key to appreciating, understanding and contriving machinery in Victorian Britain. Responsive, first, to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and later to student audiences at Cambridge, Willis constructed a science of ‘mechanism’ in both words in print and works in practice. With Whewell's sanction in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Willis's Principles of Mechanism (1841) elaborated a science of kinematics expressing geometry in motion without considerations of force. With Willis's approval, Whewell's Mechanics of Engineering (1841) began to complete and systematize a projected science of machinery, now separated from previous accounts of mechanics. Their joint project put ‘mechanism’ and the ‘mechanics of engineering’ into print in Britain as adjuncts to a liberal education in Cambridge; further, with the rapid expansion of academic provision for practical engineers from 1838 to 1841, these two Fellows offered their progeny as essential fodder further afield. Reactions to this two-pronged attack varied. But it was, perhaps, Willis's work with elaborate demonstration lectures, using special apparatus built by London mechanists and marketed by educational entrepreneurs, that effectively disseminated the new science.

Among the many engravings of landscapes, buildings, portraits and other illustrations produced by the seventeenth-century artist Wenceslaus Hollar, there are a small number of images of contemporary men of science. Of particular interest is the portrait of the instrument-maker Elias Allen, both because portraits of men of his social status were extremely uncommon at this time, and also because the cluttered mass of instruments shown in the image presents a picture wholly unlike other portraits of the period. The first part of this paper explores the position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility, and seeks to present an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Allen (made by Hendrik van der Borcht and no longer extant) might have been made. The second part looks at the image itself, and discusses possible reasons for Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original.

Fleeming Jenkin's swamping argument (1867) is re-examined in relation to subsequent criticisms of its assumptions. Jenkin's original argument purported to show that, under blending inheritance, natural selection could not operate on ‘sports’ or ‘single variations’. A serious flaw in Jenkin's model was exposed in a forgotten paper in 1871. Darwin accepted Jenkin's ‘flawed’ conclusion, though he did not fully understand the argument. Both Jenkin and Darwin regarded the swamping argument as a barrier to evolution within a single lineage. A completely different interpretation of the phrase ‘swamping argument’, first put forward by Romanes in 1886, identified it with the problem of the role of free intercrossing in preventing speciation. The latter problem also underlies current debate about the possibility of sympatric speciation and is as serious under particulate as under blending inheritance. Jenkin's argument depended on the assumption of blending inheritance; when modified to remove the ‘flaw’ in his model, it ceased to present a barrier to the operation of natural selection within a lineage, provided that the mutation rate was high enough to maintain adequate genetic variability under blending.

In this paper I address C. A. Coulson's teaching activities, writing textbooks and delivering popular science lectures, as well as his popular lectures on religion and the ‘scientific’ sermons delivered in his capacity as a lay preacher of the Methodist Church. I will pay particular attention to his thoughts on science. His commitment to forging a way to reconcile science and religion was built upon a reflection on the aims and methods of science within the broader framework of science's role in post-Second World War society. By noting that Coulson valued chemistry, mathematics and science in general, as a kind of religious activity, I argue that he wrote masterful textbooks and delivered popular science lectures as lay sermons. These were activities which Coulson pursued energetically to build a community of science adepts and proselytes. And winning young, and indeed not so young, people to science meant teaching them one of the languages that could be used to reach God. In the same way, I extend my argument to his popular lectures on religion and his ‘scientific’ sermons and claim that they should be viewed as popular science lectures addressed to an audience that was often ignorant, or even suspicious, of science.

In 1915, after acquiring first-hand knowledge of the new free radical chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Antonio García Banús (1888–1955) became professor of organic chemistry at the University of Barcelona and created his own research group, which was to last from 1915 until 1936. He was a gifted teacher and a prolific writer who attempted to introduce international scientific standards into his local environment. This paper analyses the bridges that Banús built between the experimental culture of organic chemistry at the ETH and the University of Barcelona. It presents a case study which aims to provide new historical data for the general analysis of groups who conducted their work in the European periphery.

In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked entirely within ordinary scientific practice, the paper focuses on how he managed to create an institutional and conceptual space for his geology at one of the centres for the education of the Anglican clergy, and on the impact the sometimes paradoxical demands had on his interpretation of prehistoric human relics, the Red Lady in particular. Buckland was famous if not notorious for his peculiar humour, the distracting and cathartic qualities of which, it will be argued, served as strategy in the advancement of unorthodox ideas or for glossing over inconsistencies.

Although Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) is frequently cited by historians in relation to the impact of evolutionary theories on the Victorian churches, attention has not been paid to the audiences of working-class men in Glasgow for whom the papers were originally constructed. By drawing upon the notebook in which the author sketched out the series of addresses, in addition to materials relating to the interpretative habits of these audiences; I am able to consider the text as a work of practical apologetics rather than as a contribution to elite intellectual debate. This paper promises to open up new lines of enquiry with regard to the materials with which working-class audiences attempted to construct their own interpretations of contemporary scientific and religious issues. It also highlights Drummond's hitherto unrecognized use of specific practices of biblical exegesis and his debt to the work of the anatomist Richard Owen which, by keeping different forms of life distinct, and explaining organization as the effect of life already present, allowed the author to visualize the process of descent in terms of an inherent tendency to change in line with the unfolding of a pre-existing plan.

Following the death of James Joseph Sylvester in 1897, contributions were collected in order to mark his life and work by a suitable memorial. This initiative resulted in the Sylvester Medal, which is awarded triennially by the Royal Society for the encouragement of research into pure mathematics. Ironically the main advocate for initiating this medal was not a fellow mathematician but the chemist and naturalist Raphael Meldola. Religion, not mathematics, provided the link between Meldola and Sylvester; they were among the very few Jewish Fellows of the Royal Society. This paper focuses primarily on the politics of the Anglo-Jewish community and why it, together with a number of scientists and mathematicians, supported Meldola in creating the Sylvester Medal.

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.

Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.

Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. By Karin Tybjerg 194

Natalia Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000. By Evelyn Edson 196

David Cantor (ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates. By Daniel Brownstein 197

Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. By John Henry 199

Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. By John Henry 200

Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society. By Christoph Lüthy 201

Richard L. Hills, James Watt, Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736–1774. By David Philip Miller 203

René Sigrist (ed.), H.-B. de Saussure (1740–1799): Un Regard sur la terre, Albert V. Carozzi and John K. Newman (eds.), Lectures on Physical Geography given in 1775 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure at the Academy of Geneva/Cours de géographie physique donné en 1775 par Horace-Bénédict de Saussure à l'Académie de Genève and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes: Augmentés des Voyages en Valais, au Mont Cervin et autour du Mont Rose. By Martin Rudwick 206

Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. By Richard Yeo 208

David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England. By Geoffrey Cantor 209

Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. By Dorinda Outram 210

Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. By David Knight 211

George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. By Michael H. Whitworth 212

Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe. By Ursula Klein 214

Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940. By Piers J. Hale 215

Paola Govoni, Un pubblico per la scienza: La divulgazione scientifica nell'Italia in formazione. By Pietro Corsi 216

R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora and J. H. Voigt (eds.), Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller. Volume II: 1860–1875. By Jim Endersby 217

Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. With a New Afterword. By Piers J. Hale 219

Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century. By Steven French 220

Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird, John Logie Baird: A Life. By Sean Johnston 221

Robin L. Chazdon and T. C. Whitmore (eds.), Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology: Classic Papers with Commentaries. By Joel B. Hagen 223

Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History. By Peter J. Bowler 223

Henry Harris, Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited. By Rainer Brömer 224

Hélène Gispert (ed.), ‘Par la Science, pour la patrie’: L'Association française pour l'avancement des sciences (1872–1914), un projet politique pour une société savante. By Cristina Chimisso 225

Henry Le Chatelier, Science et industrie: Les Débuts du taylorisme en France. By Robert Fox 227

Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich. By Jonathan Harwood 227

Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge; The true Story of Soviet Science. By C. A. J. Chilvers 229

Guy Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War. By David Edgerton 230

Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, the Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics. By Arne Hessenbruch 230

Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, John M. Logsdon (ed.), Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Volume V: Exploring the Cosmos and Douglas J. Mudgway, Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network 1957–1997. By Jon Agar 231

Helen Ross and Cornelis Plug, The Mystery of the Moon Illusion: Exploring Size Perception. By Klaus Hentschel 233

Matthew R. Edwards (ed.), Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation. By Friedrich Steinle 234

Ernest B. Hook (ed.), Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect. By Alex Dolby 235

John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery. By Alex Dolby 236

Rosalind Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change. By Keith Vernon 237

Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums. By Anthony Coulls 238

Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (eds.), Cambridge Scientific Minds and David Millar, Ian Millar, John Millar and Margaret Millar, The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists. By Maria Yamalidou 466

Maria Michela Sassi, The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. By Laurence M. V. Totelin 467

H. L. L. Busard, Johannes de Tinemue's Redaction of Euclid's Elements, the So-called Adelard III Version. Volume I: Introduction, Sigla and Descriptions of the Manuscripts, Editorial Remarks, Euclides, Elementa. Volume II: Conspectus Siglorum, Apparatus Criticus, Addenda. By Jackie Stedall 468

Gerhard W. Kramer, The Firework Book: Gunpowder in Medieval Germany. By Simon Werrett 469

Robert Crocker (ed.), Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. By Scott Mandelbrote 470

Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750. By Owen Gingerich 471

Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician. By Georgette Ironside 472

J. Christiaan Boudri, What was Mechanical about Mechanics: The Concept of Force between Metaphysics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange. By Niccolò Guicciardini 473

Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World. By Graeme Gooday 474

Berit Pedersen (ed.), A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomological Society. By J. F. M. Clark 476

Richard Yeo, Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture 1800–1860. By Leigh D. Bregman 477

Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays. By Nick Fisher 478

Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry. A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. By Sophie Forgan 479

Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. By Kenneth F. Kiple 480

Greta Jones, ‘Captain of All these Men of Death’: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland. By Juliana Adelman 481

Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. By Hazel Hutchison 482

Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung. By Peter Zigman 484

Maggie Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines. By Sean Johnston 485

A. M. Moulin and A. Cambrosio (eds.), Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology/Dialogues entre soi: Questions historiques et débats contemporains en immunologie. By Pauline M. H. Mazumdar 486

Ioan James, Remarkable Mathematicians: From Euler to von Neutmann. By Claire Jones 487

Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba (eds.), Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development. By Adrian Rice 488

Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx (eds.), Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. By Leigh Clayton 490

Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. By Steven French 491

When Jan Golinski's Making Natural Knowledge was published in 1998 it was generally applauded for its ecumenical stance between the empirical ‘art’ of historians and the theoretical focus of the social sciences. Indeed, such a middling position was a unique approach to be taken in wake of the ‘science wars’ and this, in combination with the book's clear organization and (for the most part) forthright prose, quickly earned it a place upon HPS, STS and SSK postgraduate reading lists. Now, five years since its first edition was published (hardback, 1998), the work has become a standard introduction to historically minded scholars interested in the constructivist programme. In fact, it has been called the ‘constructivist's bible’ in many a conference corridor. Since the book has attained such a status (and since it has not been reviewed in the BJHS), it is perhaps worth reflecting on whether or not such canonical text (to use a biblical analogy) is fallible or inerrant – especially in relation to its content and pedagogical efficacy.