For fifteen years, from 1662 until his death in 1677, Henry Oldenburg served the Royal Society as second Secretary and was charged with almost the entire burden of its correspondence, domestic and foreign. During this time he acted as a centre for the communication of scientific news, searching out new sources of information, encouraging men everywhere to make their work public, acting as an intermediary between scientists and, through the Philosophical Transactions, providing a medium for the publication of short scientific papers. Oldenburg's contribution to scientific communication was unique in the seventeenth century, not least because he represented the Royal Society (of which he was an original Fellow) and served all its members impartially. It is not too much to say that he invented the professions of scientific administrator and scientific journalist.

The simple belief that Galileo ‘invented’ dynamics or kinematics was destroyed long ago. Yet there can be no doubt of the revolution in ideas of motion associated with his name. The paper examines some recent work in this field and evaluates the nature and extent of Galileo's contributions.

The paper covers a period of little more than two years in the early history of the Royal Institution, but it is the period in which the house in Albemarle Street was purchased and Count Rumford devoted all his energies to establishing in it the Institution he had conceived. The house was enlarged and adapted to its new purpose; at first a temporary and later the well-known lecture theatre were built. The first Resident Professor and lecturer in the new theatre was Thomas Garnett, whose brief and unhappy connection with the Royal Institution is recorded.

Historians of seventeenth-century science have frequently asserted that Kepler's laws of planetary motion were largely ignored between the time of their first publication (1609, 1619) and the publication of Newton's Principia (1687). In fact, however, they were more widely known and accepted than has been generally recognized.

Kepler's ideas were, indeed, rather slow in establishing themselves, and until about 1630 there are few references to them in the literature of the time. But from then onwards, interest in them increased fairly rapidly. In particular, the principle of elliptical orbits had been accepted by most of the leading astronomers in France before 1645 and in England by about 1655. It also received quite strong support in Holland.

The second law had a more chequered history. It was enunciated in its exact form by a few writers and was used in practice by some others without being explicitly formulated, but the majority, especially after 1645, preferred one or another of several variant forms which were easier to use but only approximately correct. The third law attracted less interest than the others, chiefly perhaps because it had no satisfactory theoretical basis, but it was correctly stated by at least six writers during the period under review.

Between about 1630 and 1650 Kepler's Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (in which all three laws were clearly formulated) was probably the most widely read work on theoretical astronomy in northern and western Europe, while his Rudolphine Tables, which were based upon the first two laws, were regarded by the majority of astronomers as the most accurate planetary tables available.

Kepler's work certainly did not receive all the recognition it deserved, but the extent to which it was neglected has been much exaggerated.

It has become generally accepted that the earliest geoheliocentric representation of the planets' motions in which the majority of the planets orbited about the Sun appeared in 1588. For in this year the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe announced his discovery of a new system of the world, in which Sun and Moon moved about the Earth, and the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn performed their motions about the Sun. Yet the accompanying figure, which depicts a planetary arrangement in general identical with that of Tycho, occurs in a manuscript prepared at least a year before Tycho's publication of his system. Moreover, the author of the manuscript derived this representation of the planets' motions not from Tycho, but rather from Copernicus. The aim of this paper is to show that as a result of the work of Copernicus, a number of sixteenth-century mathematicians produced treatments of the planetary motions similar to the system proposed by Tycho in 1588.

The conventional view of the prehistory of Newton's synthesis in the Principia of his predecessors' work in planetary theory and terrestrial gravitation is still not seriously changed from that which Newton himself chose to impose on his contemporaries at the end of his life. In his own words:

‘… the same year ‘1666’ I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon & having found out how to estimate the force wth wch [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere from Keplers rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their Orbs, & having deduced that the forces wch keep the Planets in their orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about wch they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly …’

The response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.

The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others.

The exploitation of the lead resources of this country by the Romans commenced very soon after their arrival and shows every sign of being a well organized trade. Little evidence of deep mining has survived and it is probable that most of the ore was obtained by means of shallow workings, mainly in Somerset, Salop, Flintshire and Derbyshire. Although the silver content does not seem ever to have been as high as that of some well-known mines in the Mediterranean, it is clear that silver has been extracted by the Romans from some of the British lead. The lead was cast in carefully made moulds, producing pigs with inscriptions which indicate their date. These were then used for the pipes, cisterns and pewter tableware which contributed to the high standard of living of the period.

The atomic theory of Dalton implied that there were more than 30 different kinds of matter, the chemical elements. William Prout (1815) was the first of a long line of distinguished speculators who sought to show, by argument and experiment, that this diversity overlay a more fundamental unity. Contrary to a common opinion, this was not an eccentric and unpopular movement, but involved many of the great names of nineteenth-century chemistry; and some of their speculations have proved to be very near the mark. It may be that this strong current of well-informed speculation enabled the discoveries of cathode rays and of radioactivity (which provided the first real evidence of the complexity of the atom) to be integrated into the body of science with such remarkable rapidity.

The concept of popularization, in the present context, implies the existence of a reading public interested in science, together with a corpus of scientific knowledge, part of which, in its range and complexity, was outside the limits of the general understanding.

References to the stars permeate the writings of Paracelsus (1493–1541); yet modern authorities comment on the way he restricted astrological influence. The contradiction is only apparent, and disappears when the significance he attached to the relevant vocabulary is understood. He had in mind a kind of influence rather different from that usually thought of in connection with astrology, and the astrological jargon he bandied about had a metaphorical more often than a literal meaning. In his major works, signs of detailed interest in the movements of the actual stars are few; the ‘astrological’ terminology hides a system of natural explanation by virtues or forces largely immanent in earthly objects.

In 1661 Gerard Kinckhuysen published at Haerlem an introduction to algebra written in Dutch. Because of the clarity and compactness of its presentation it was considered suitable for dissemination to a wider class of readers than those able to read Low Dutch. Nicolaus Mercator, a wellknown mathematician of German origin, who had come to England as a young man in the later 1650s, was asked by Lord Brouncker to prepare a Latin translation of it. To this Isaac Newton, at the request of Isaac Barrow and John Collins, added explanatory notes and comments, and the manuscript was sent to Collins in London on 11 July 1670. Newton's draft, though still unpublished, is preserved, but Mercator's original translation was believed to have been lost. Only recently I rediscovered it in the Bodleian in a bound volume deriving from the estate of the Oxford mathematician John Wallis, which contains several books and pamphlets once in his possession.

This article is divided into four sections:

I. A survey of Kinckhuysen's Algebra ofte Stel-konst.

II. A summary of Newton's notes and additions to it.

III. An account of the unsuccessful efforts of Collins and Newton to publish the Mercator translation, enlarged with Newton's comments—this is abstracted from Collins' correspondence with Newton, Wallis and Gregory.

IV. A description of the volume now in the Bodleian Library, press-marked ‘Savile G. 20’, which has Mercator's translation interleaved with the printed Dutch original and bound with other books once owned by Wallis.

The preceding paper described how all-pervasive was the influence that Paracelsus designated ‘astral’. In what sense, then, is it true that he placed restrictions, on astrological powers? The restriction applies to the more limited and usual sense of astrology, referring to the control of events on earth by the stars in the sky. Paracelsus was not prepared to hand over our fates entirely to a distant autocracy of the stars quite beyond our control.

The early years of the nineteenth century were a time of new life and fresh thought in the scientific institutions of England and France. Despite the domination of the public scene by the rise and fall of Napoleon, scientists in the two countries were able to share their discoveries and work together. Napoleon even encouraged this; for example, foreigners were not barred from competing for the scientific prizes he offered. At a time when many of his compatriots were detained in France, Sir Humphry Davy was given special permission to travel freely because the object of his journey was scientific. His travels in France gave Davy the opportunity of meeting many of his most eminent contemporaries. The best scientific work in Europe was being done in Paris at the Collège de France and at the Ecole Polytechnique. H. R. Yorke, an English journalist in Paris in 1814, in spite of his prejudice against the Institut National affirms that ‘it is but a tribute of justice which every man owes to superiour genius to declare that in point of real science or experimental philosophy France is Without a Rival’.

As early as 1670 Isaac Barrow and Isaac Newton, at Cambridge, were aware of the production of astigmatism by oblique pencils of rays on a spherical lens. Thomas Young (1800) and G. B. Airy (1825) independently discovered ocular astigmatism. By viewing the image of objects reflected on the anterior surface of the cornea, the cornea may be examined for any defects of its surface (including astigmatism). The corneal “reflex” had been examined as early as 1619 by Christoph Scheiner, and as a “clinical” test, by using a candle flame, by David Brewster (1808). An instrument (the keratoscope) for examining the anterior surface of the cornea for the detection of abnormality was first invented by Henry Goode (1847) of Cambridge University. Antonio Plácido, formerly credited with the invention, independently invented a keratoscope in 1880. Correspondence of Plácido and Emile Javal (Paris) reveals that Placido invented the photo-keratoscope, formerly attributed to Allvar Gullstrand (1896) in Sweden. Javal is credited with the first description of the application of a photo-keratoscope (independently invented by him) in a specific case of ocular abnormality.

Professor Thomson had been a typical Scottish ‘lad o’ pairts'. Deservant of repute as teacher, scientist, editor and historian, his most distinctive achievements were in scientific journalism and propaganda. These were powerfully exhibited in the interests of Dalton's Atomism and of Prout's Hypothesis—and in university politics.

His work for Chambers' Encyclopaedia and for Nicholson's Journal was influential and effective. His textbooks gained an international esteem and each successive edition was kept up to date.

Much of his professional outlook and experience is expressed in his History of Chemistry (2 vols. 1830–31). Researches in his old Department at Glasgow on his choice and use of material provide the main topics of this Address. These volumes are still important.

The beginning of the kinetic theory of gases is usually assigned to the year 1738, when Daniel Bernouilli's Hydrodynamica appeared at Strasbourg. The famous tenth section of this book pursued some of the consequences of the assumption that ‘elastic fluids’ consist of innumerable tiny particles in rapid motion. It was, as everyone knows, forgotten for many decades.

Johann Gregor Mendel read his paper, “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden”, to the Naturforschender Verein in Brno, in two parts, the first at the Society's meeting on 8 February 1865, and the second at the next meeting a month later. It was subsequently published in the Society's proceedings for the year 1865 which appeared in print in 1866.

There is a wealth of source material to be digested by the historian. From about 1800 onwards books and specialized scientific journals have appeared in ever-increasing numbers, and he may feel overwhelmed by the printed sources. But printed material can supply only a part of the information he needs. The printed word of a scientist rarely shows how he arrived at his concepts, why they took the turn they did and what influences contributed to their formation and development. For these the historian must turn to private papers, to correspondence, to laboratory notebooks, diaries, drawings and designs and to whatever other record of day-by-day thinking may have been kept.