This chapter focuses on the knowledge tradition known as science, as it was practised in the Pacific during the two and a half centuries following Bougainville and Cook’s voyages of self-consciously ‘scientific’ exploration in the late eighteenth century.1 Rather than trying to summarize the full breadth of scientific activities in the Pacific across more than 250 years, I will focus on one continuous tradition of research – studies of how islands were formed – that brings into relief three broader themes characteristic of scientific ways of knowing Oceania: the significance of typological (or taxonomic) thinking c. 1770–1850; a shift in the effects of long-distance travel on scientific practices and theories from about 1820 to 1920; and the tendency to view individual Pacific islands as ‘laboratories’ for the development of scientific ideas from the late nineteenth century to the present.