In 1605, not content with having found key positions at court for his favourite Scottish physicians, some of whom were known Paracelsians, James VI of Scotland and I of England ensured their acceptance as members of the London College of Physicians by having the College statutes altered. As a Scot (and therefore a foreigner), Thomas Craig, James's chief physician during his Scottish reign, should have been automatically excluded, and the Comitia of the College, which met on 3 January 1605 to discuss, among other matters, the eligibility of Craig for membership, duly explained its predicament to James.

Art and science are both terms whose meanings have been subject to change over time. At the end of the twentieth century, the terms tend to be used antithetically. Current views of the relationship between the spheres of activity that they connote range from a sweeping dismissal of any connection to an opposing but less extreme conviction that scientists and artists have something in common. The latter belief apparently at least partly stems from an underlying feeling that at any one time both activities are, after all, products of a single culture. The woolly shade of C. P. Snow's idea of there being ‘two cultures’ in the Britain of the 1950s at once rises to view if one attempts to pursue analysis along these lines.

In setting up a conference called ‘The Visual Culture of Art and Science from the Renaissance to the Present’ the organizing committee was not attempting to resolve any kind of debate that may be perceived to exist in regard to the separation or otherwise of the domains of art and science. Rather, we wished to bring together historians of science working on areas that are of interest to historians of art, and historians of art working on areas that are of interest to historians of science, as well as practising artists and scientists of the present time who show an interest in each others' fields. We were, of course, aware that this agenda raised questions in regard to present-day relationships between art and science, but we hoped that, as we were dealing with a range of historical periods, any light that was shed would be moderately illuminating rather than blindingly lurid. The meeting, which took place on 12–14 July 1995, mainly at the Royal Society in London, was organized jointly by the British Society for the History of Science, the Association of Art Historians and the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) – a joint committee of the Royal Institution, British Association and the Royal Society. The historical examples presented at the conference showed a wide variety of interactions between art and science. The success of the conference (it attracted an audience of about 200) suggested very strongly that art, which has a large public following, can be used to encourage an interest in science, whose public following, according to scientists, could be better.

Until the first quarter of the seventeenth century there was a great deal of agreement about the nature of mathematical practice. Mathematicians, as well as their patrons and clients, viewed all possible aspects of their work, both theoretical and practical, as being included within their discipline. Although the mathematical sciences were a fairly recent foreign import to England, which can barely be traced back beyond the mid-sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a large and growing body of practitioners with a unified view of their subject's identity. Divisions began to appear, however, and they were often framed in terms of the proper mixture of theory and practice in mathematical education.

One early sign of the emergence of this tension is the kind of accusation made in the priority dispute between William Oughtred and Richard Delamain taking place around 1632. Their bitter conflict began over who first invented the Horizontal Quadrant, a form of sundial, and the Circles of Proportion, a logarithmic calculating device that can be considered a precursor of the slide rule, and ended in a dispute over what constituted proper mathematical practice. Oughtred accused Delamain of making his students ‘only doers of tricks, and as it were Juglers’ by teaching them the use of instruments without any theoretical foundation. Instruments, Oughtred claimed, could only be used with understanding by students who had a proper theoretical foundation. He advocated postponing their use until after the theoretical foundations of a subject had been thoroughly mastered. Delamain, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to teach practical instrumental operations without insisting upon a theoretical grounding. This paper will use the dispute between Oughtred and Delamain to investigate the breakdown of consensus over internal mathematical boundaries, the rhetoric and strategies involved in attempts to gain authority by mathematical practitioners, and the extent to which their roles were negotiated, both with other practitioners, and with their patrons and students.

‘Poor Borelli!’ exclaimed Alexandre Koyre at the end of his wonderful and by now classic study of Borelli's ‘celestial mechanics’. Koyre frankly admitted that Borelli lacked Newton's genius and intellectual audacity. However, in his story Borelli deserved a place between Kepler and Newton for his ‘imperfect but decisive’ unification of terrestrial and celestial physics. This framework finds a powerful justification in Borelli's extensive usage of Keplerian astronomy and in Newton's references to Borelli's work on the Medicean planets, Theoricae mediceorum planetarum (Florence, 1666), both in his correspondence with Edmond Halley, with regard to a controversy with Robert Hooke, and in Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687). Newton's own copy of Borelli's work with signs of his reading – the famous dog-earings – is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The magnitude of Newton's achievement has haunted Borelli's work ever since Principia mathematica appeared in print. For example, although Christiaan Huygens was sent a copy of Borelli's book by Prince Leopold in 1666, his marginal annotations in his own copy of the book were written after he had read Newton's masterpiece, as if Huygens had felt the need to read the book again after 1687. From then onwards Borelli's work has almost inevitably appeared in a new light that has coloured its subsequent readings.

My ambition in this paper is to provide a fresh reading of Borelli's work by reconstructing its circumstances of composition, establishing a comparison with a relevant strictly contemporary source, and attending to the immediate reception of Theoricae. Borelli's work was written with an eye to a composite audience including Roman Jesuits, Sicilian intellectual circles and Leopold de' Medici's correspondents across the Alps, such as the Copernican astronomer Ismael Boulliau in Paris. Borelli was aware that his Sicilian readers were likely to have different concerns from those of Roman Jesuits or the Medici. Thus the task of charting the reception of his work is a formidable one. For a variety of reasons, including availability of sources, limitations of space, taste and competence, my analysis of Borelli's work on the Medicean planets is limited to a few themes and is not only no less partial than Koyre's, but in many respects it relies on it. If readers feel stimulated to re-read Koyre's text, one of the aims of this paper will have been fulfilled.

These gems have life in them: their colours speak,

Say what words fail of.

In an ambitious treatise on the estimated wealth of the British Empire in the year of Waterloo, Patrick Colquhoun added to his calculations of the revenues produced by overseas property the potential profits created through exploiting natural resources. In his ‘political arithmetic’, Colquhoun recognized that an increasingly lucrative resource could be found in ‘mines and minerals’, where ‘various articles extracted from the bowels of the earth, which the new discoveries in chemistry have rendered valuable articles of commerce, have tended greatly to increase the value of the mines’. Such information, accumulated through travel, skilled techniques of identification and analysis, and collecting, proved central to regulating judgements about potential overseas investment by the government.

Practices in natural history intersected with the development of British commerce in a number of ways. Mineralogists specially trained to identify rare species of minerals scoured distant shores and collected sack-loads of specimens, seeking information about natural resources that might nourish a developing imperial economy. One such British mineralogist was John Mawe, who in 1804 received patronage from Portugal's Prince Regent to embark on ‘a voyage of commercial experiment’ to the Portuguese territory of Brazil and assess the value of the gold and diamond industries that might revitalize their ailing and isolated economy. National and individual economic interests were informed and served by the multiplication of such acts of commercial speculation, which focused on various kinds of natural resources. Mawe was very conscious that the mineral kingdom held much to be explored. Unlike botany, with Linnaean taxonomy rendering order to the kingdom, knowledge in mineralogy was far from comprehensive. Mawe lamented that ‘few have thought the knowledge of Minerals worthy of their attention, although to them we owe our national strength and riches’. Others also argued that because it addressed national interests, research and education in the earth sciences should be publicly patronized.

The medium of visual representation played a crucial role in the Enlightenment project of taking intellectual possession of nature, and of dominating it. Pictures helped to categorize the various natural phenomena, to disseminate knowledge about their appearance and, so to speak, to capture them on paper or canvas. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, natural historians treating extreme and threatening natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, waterspouts or geysers, increasingly supplemented their written accounts with engraved illustrations. In this paper, I concentrate on the visual treatment of earthquakes in learned publications. I discuss two different types of graphic representation of this natural phenomenon, which had always been considered as virtually ‘undepictable’.

After the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, research into the subject was greatly stimulated. Two scholars, the British natural philosopher John Michell and the Dutchman Johan Drijfhout, published earthquake treatises in learned journals, and each complemented his text with a diagrammatic illustration. By translating their theoretical considerations into the abstract form of geological sections, these natural philosophers moulded a new visual language for seismology and earth history. An entirely different example of visual representation as a tool in research into earthquakes can be seen in the approach to the earthquake in Calabria in 1783. The Neapolitan Academy of Science and Letters sent some of its members to investigate the devastating effects of this earthquake on the landscape and the nature of the country. The topographical changes were recorded on the spot by trained draughtsmen, with the aim of providing accurate and comprehensive visual documentation. The pictures are remarkable in the way they reveal a conflict between the new demands of modern empirical science and the established ‘picturesque’ conventions of landscape painting.

Compared with other scientists of the nineteenth century, the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–73) was a complex figure. In part, this was because Liebig established such broad borders for his science. Chemical methods, popular and professional publications about chemistry, technological applications, promoting the car and even politics – all were central concerns stemming from Liebig's notion of chemistry as the central science.

When Liebig discovered John Stuart Mill's Logic, a work on the philosophy of science, it struck a deep chord within him. Mill's high praise for Liebig's chemistry certainly provided Liebig with a means to promote his own reputation. In addition, Mill's Logic presented science as a central method for the general reform of society, a goal Liebig was himself struggling to define in the early 1840s. In the scientific method, Mill discovered a ‘rule by the elite’, which he could never find nor justify in his political philosophy. This was a rule that greatly appealed to Liebig, and he set out to ensure that Mill's work was translated and published in German. Though many details of this transaction are known, this paper seeks to investigate the relationship between Liebig and Mill's book, and the significance of this relationship for understanding Liebig's role as a gatekeeper and inter-relations between science and politics.

The year was 1843, and the theme of English meteorology was measurement. Sir ‘Thunder-and-lightning’ William Snow Harris was given his last British Association for the Advancement of Science grant to complete the Plymouth series of over 120,000 thermometric observations, publication of which proved a costly venture, not least because the series implied no meteorological theory whatsoever.

In July of that year, however, John Herschel wrote to William Radcliffe Birt that the atmosphere might be considered ‘a vehicle for wave like movement which may embrace in their single swell & fall a whole quadrant of a globe’. The idea of ‘atmospheric wave’, thought Herschel, might well make sense of the odd series of London barometric readings made in September 1836, but, more significantly, it might also lead towards solving the notorious ‘storm controversy’ of the 1830s between the American meteorologists William Redfield and James Pollard Espy. If Birt would accept, Herschel would propose him to the British Association as the director of the new project to discover laws of weather behaviour.

Generally, the mass media in Britain, as elsewhere, treat the history of science as arcane knowledge. A few iconic tales do none the less come to permeate public consciousness. How do these come to be selected from the myriad of possible narratives?

One of the most enduring and well known of stories is the discovery of penicillin, which stretched from Alexander Fleming's observation in 1928 to the award of the Nobel prize to Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in 1945 and the subsequent dominance of American companies in its manufacture. During the 1980s, when it appeared scandalous that monoclonal antibodies discovered in Cambridge, England, had not been patented by the British government, the parallel was often made with penicillin. An alternative use was made of the story when, in July 1995, a columnist in London's Evening Standard criticized massive expenditure on medical research and claimed that most drugs were discovered by accident. He sustained his thesis by merely putting in pointed parentheses the one word, ‘penicillin’. The same year, partisans found space in the correspondence columns of the New Scientist to return enthusiastically to the debate over the proper disposition of credit between Fleming and Florey. The BBC's Money Programme broadcast a piece on how best to support inventors today in October 1996; it included film of the Science Museum's coverage of Fleming.

The story of penicillin seems therefore bound, time and time again, to great issues in British culture: pride over technological prowess, resentment over the loss of opportunity, jealousy of American success, the National Health Service and the emergence of the modern pharmaceutical industry. The appeal of the story and meaning of its associations are matched by reverence for its material relics. In high profile auctions, the sale of samples prepared by Fleming raises thousands of pounds and is previewed in the newspages and on the radio. The original plate on which Fleming observed penicillin with its sterile ring surrounding the healing penicillin is one of the most familiar of historic relics (Figure 1).

Recently, while reading papers left by the chemist Raphael Meldola (1849–1915), I came across seventy-two letters that relate to a 1904 campaign, led by Meldola, to have a memorial tablet for Herbert Spencer placed in Westminster Abbey. A list of those who eventually signed Meldola's petition to the Dean of Westminster can be found in David Duncan's Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. The Meldola Papers include letters from some, but not all, of the signatories, from people who refused to sign, and from one or two who agreed to sign, but whose names do not appear on the published list. The surviving correspondence is probably incomplete, as can be inferred from references in the existing letters and from the fact that the Meldola Papers appear to have been somewhat haphazardly collected. Together, the letters show how Spencer's work was viewed by some of Britain's leading intellectuals, shortly after his death in 1903. They reveal that the details of Spencer's work were largely forgotten and that Meldola's correspondents were divided on whether Spencer had been simply a controversialist or had done something worthwhile. Even those (the majority) who believed the latter were unable to articulate exactly what was worthwhile in Spencer's work.

This paper records some of the content of the letters as well as some details of the memorial campaign and of the people involved. My main purpose is to bring these interesting letters to light. James Moore has written of the successful effort to have Charles Darwin buried in Westminster Abbey and of the subsequent campaign for an Abbey memorial plaque, and for a statue to be placed in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The unsuccessful campaign on behalf of Spencer, twenty-two years later, provides an interesting comparison. It is not my purpose fully to explore the cultural implications. However, the letters suggest that this and one or two other avenues of inquiry might be worth pursuing.

Stargazing Knight Errant, beware of the day When the Hottentots catch thee observing away! Be sure they will pluck thy eyes out of their sockets To prevent thee from stuffing the stars in thy pockets

If Herschel should find a new star at the Cape, His perils no longer would pain us He will salt the star's tail to prevent its escape And call it ‘The Hottentot Venus’.

Astronomy has long been recognized as a tool of empire. Its service to navigation and geography have made it indispensable to European expansion. Britain in particular excelled at this brand of control; each day when the sun set on the British empire, its telescopes continued to enhance imperial power.

While the above claims are no longer controversial, we have hardly begun to understand the extent to which imperialism subsequently changed the nature of the physical sciences.

One of the educational by-products of German botanical scholarship was the publication of sets of large ‘wall diagrams’ (Wandtafeln) for use in the lecture-room. Most British University Departments of Botany dating from the period before the first world war probably had at least one of these sets. In my own department I have used these excellent diagrams occasionally, realizing that they combined clarity, size and accuracy to an unrivalled extent.

This passage from a recent essay by S. M. Walters forms an appropriate introduction to the topic of this paper. From the start, it should be noticed that the use of such diagrams (referred to as ‘wallcharts’ in the rest of the paper) was by no means limited to botany nor to university studies. As will become clear, they were one of the most important media for the teaching and learning at different levels of education and within different fields.

Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. 204. ISBN 0-472-09548-X, £31.50, $44.50 (hardback); 0-472-06548-3, no price given (paperback).

Michel Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. viii+760. ISBN 0-631-17739-6. £75.00, $100.00.

Michel Serres is one of the best-known philosopher-critics in France, and his name is likely to draw many readers to these two books. With sales of 50,000 copies of his La Légende des anges (1993; trans., Paris, 1995), 100,000 copies of Le Contrat naturel (1990; trans., Ann Arbor, 1995) and 300,000 copies of Le Tiers-instruit (1991; trans., forthcoming), Serres's official eminence (he was elected to the Académie Française in 1990) is more than matched by contemporary popularity. Originally trained in mathematics and logic, Serres undertook doctoral research with Gaston Bachelard – and it shows. Even at his most allusive, Serres's dexterous prose often slips into neat axiomatic and Euclidean certainties, while one can see much of both his aggressively anti-epistemological stance and his easy traffic across the science–poetics divide as an effort to distance himself from his former mentor. But, like Bachelard, Serres has a commanding range, is hugely prolific and writes – if one may say this of one of the ‘Immortals’ – with a glee and innocence that one associates with the rank amateur.

Serres, a professor of the history of science at the Sorbonne, is no amateur. ‘History of science’, he has said, ‘that's my trade’. So it may be, yet many, hearing of his forays into the history of angelology, the natural rights of trees, the iconography of Tintin and the moral status of airport terminals, are entitled to ask whether Serres is to be trusted. Put another way, should one take Serres seriously? The question is worth asking at the outset, for there is little more aggravating than intellectual energy and enthusiasm one feels with hindsight to have been misplaced. How many readers of Michel Foucault, one wonders, were shocked to find him saying in his last lectures that he admired Diogenes the Cynic, the shameless philosopher who masturbated in the Athenian public square, pour épater les bourgeois, so to speak? Maybe Foucault's oeuvre was a similar snub from a maître-penseur – a kind of masterpation, if you will.

For the artist, mathematics does not consist of the various branches of mathematics. It is not necessarily a matter of calculation but rather of the presence of a sovereign power; a law of infinite resonance, consonance, organisation. Rigour is nothing other than that which truly results in a work of art, whether it be a Leonardo drawing, or the fearsome exactness of the Parthenon (comparable in the cutting of its marble even with that of machine-tools), or the implacable and impeccable play of construction in the cathedral, or the unity in a Cézanne, or the law which determines a tree, the unitary splendour of roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Chance has no place in nature. Once one has understood what mathematics is – in the philosophical sense – thereafter one can discern it in all its works. Rigour, and exactness, are the means behind achieving solutions, the cause behind character, the rationale behind harmony.

Le Corbusier, 1948

Probably everyone reading this article has heard of Le Corbusier, no doubt the most famous architect this century, but the images he will arouse in their minds may vary greatly. Some will blame him for those theories promoting standardized high rise construction, which have dominated town planning policy in post-war Europe. Others will admire his highly individual, sculptural buildings such as the church at Ronchamp (1950–55) (see Figure 1), the revolutionary public housing scheme of the Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles (1946–52) (Figure 2), its ground-level pillars (pilotis) and roof-level service stacks alike transformed into enigmatic statues, or his pre-war Purist villas in the Paris suburbs (1920s). His work displayed a wide variety of forms and spaces at any one time, and his career spanned almost sixty years, during which he was constantly questioning, and reformulating theories, and in consequence changing his formal language.

Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xx+499. ISBN 0-19-823994-7. £25.00.

Stephen Gaukroger's new biography of Descartes is a major accomplishment. Gaukroger offers the reader an overview of Descartes' life and works, with healthy doses of intellectual background thrown in for good measure. It should have a major impact on Cartesian studies, both within the history of philosophy and within the history of science.

A Metaphysical Subject © Martha Fleming

National exhibitions and festivals perform a number of roles at the same time. In the first half of the twentieth century exhibitions were first and foremost trade fairs, occasions on which to promote British goods but at the same time provide an opportunity for cementing imperial relations. Exhibitions are also sites of aesthetic discourse where, for example, particular architectural or design ideologies may be promoted; in addition, they provide platforms for the conspicuous display of scientific and technical achievement; and finally, they provide opportunities for creating and projecting ideas of national identity, however multi-faceted those might be. Furthermore, in order to encourage the widest possible attendance and popularity, most exhibitions from the late nineteenth century onwards included a large number of purely entertaining attractions, which of course provided places for the mingling of social classes, something that appealed to post-1945 notions of a properly democratic society. Exhibitions therefore always perform a number of functions, some of which may indeed conflict with each other, and need to be analysed on a number of levels.

The bitterness and protracted character of the biometrician–Mendelian debate has long aroused the interest of historians of biology. In this paper, we focus on another and much less discussed facet of the controversy: competing interpretations of the inheritance of mental defect. Today, the views of the early Mendelians, such as Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, are universally seen to be mistaken. Some historians assume that the Mendelians' errors were exposed by advances in the science of genetics. Others believe that their mistakes could have been identified by contemporaries. Neither interpretation takes account of the fact that the lapses for which the Mendelian eugenicists are now notorious were, in fact, mostly identified at the time by the biometricians David Heron and Karl Pearson. In this paper we ask why their objections had so little impact. We think the answer illustrates an important general point about the social prerequisites for effective scientific critique.

The following list of archival material relating to the history of science acquired in 1996 and 1997 by British repositories is drawn from Accessions to Repositories, an annual publication compiled by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. It is important to note that these accessions may not have been catalogued and that access may therefore be restricted. Further inquiries should be addressed to the staff of the repositories concerned.

The Historical Manuscripts Commission seeks each year to collect information from over 250 repositories throughout the British Isles. This information is made available on the Internet via the Commission's website, http://www.hmc.gov.uk. The Commission will answer limited and specific postal and email inquiries. The information is also added to the indexes of the National Register of Archives, which are available for consultation in Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1HP, or via the Internet on the address above. Alternatively, electronic users can gain access to the NRA via Telnet (telnet: public.hmc.gov.uk). Readers should be aware that the manuscript collections noted in the following digest represent only a very small part of the collected information available in the NRA.