Essay review

Benjamin Franklin, the colonial American, maintained a now little-known interest in geological questions for more than sixty years. He began as a follower of English theorists, but soon assimilated some of their ideas with original speculations and discoveries, particularly regarding earthquakes. Though Franklin became famous for his experiments with electricity, he never attempted to explain earthquakes as if they were electrical phenomena; others, however, did. Through his access to American materials, Franklin contributed significantly to the work of several English and French geological theorists. Though some of his own theories were ultimately of limited value, Franklin played an important role in the international science of his time. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was colonial America's foremost student of geology.     

Trust in expert testimony: Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition and the British response to general relativity

The 1919 British astronomical expedition led by Arthur Stanley Eddington to observe the deflection of starlight by the sun, as predicted by Einstein's relativistic theory of gravitation, is a fascinating example of the importance of expert testimony in the social transmission of scientific knowledge. While Popper lauded the expedition as science at its best, accounts by Earman and Glymour, Collins and Pinch, and Waller are more critical of Eddington's work. Here I revisit the eclipse expedition to dispute the characterization of the British response to general relativity as the blind acceptance of a partisan's pro-relativity claims by colleagues incapable of criticism. Many factors served to make Eddington the trusted British expert on relativity in 1919, and his experimental results rested on debatable choices of data analysis, choices criticized widely since but apparently not widely by his British contemporaries. By attending to how and to whom Eddington presented his testimony and how and by whom this testimony was received, I suggest, we may recognize as evidentially significant corroborating testimony from those who were expert not in relativity but in observational astronomy. We are reminded that even extraordinary expert testimony is neither offered nor accepted entirely in an epistemic vacuum.     

Failed utopias and practical chemistry: the Priestleys,the Du Ponts,and the transmission of transatlantic science, 1770–1820

ABSTRACT

Eighteenth-century events, replete with Dickensian dualities, brought two Enlightenment families to America. Pierre-Samuel du Pont and Joseph Priestley contemplated relocating their families decades before immigrating. After arriving, they discovered deficiencies in education and chemistry. Their experiences were indicative of the challenges in transmitting transatlantic chemistry. The Priestleys were primed to found an American chemical legacy. Science connected Priestley to British manufacturers, Continental chemists, and American statesmen. Priestley's marriage into the Wilkinson ironmaster dynasty, and Lunar Society membership, helped his sons apprentice, and befriend manufacturer-chemist Thomas Cooper. However, ideological persecution forced them from England. Priestley's plans for his sons to inherit Wilkinson's ironworks evaporated; in America, efforts to establish manufactories, colonies, farms, and a college miscarried. Cooper taught college chemistry, but his materialism provoked dismissals. The Du Ponts were unlikely founders of an industrial-chemistry empire. Du Pont's philosophy promulgated that agriculture, not industry, produced wealth. Eleuthère-Irénée apprenticed in France's gunpowder administration, however, plans for his succession died and director Antoine Lavoisier, a family friend, was executed. E.-I. and Du Pont's arrest precipitated relocation to America. Du Pont's utopian colony and schemes proved unrealistic. Nevertheless, E.-I.'s gunpowder manufactory—utilizing transatlantic contacts and privileged knowledge of advanced French chemistry—succeeded through practical application.     

Charles Darwin and the repugnant curators

Recently discovered documents have revealed the background to a letter published in The Darwin Correspondence, dated 21 February 1838 and sent to Charles Darwin and six others from John George Children of the British Museum. It concerned a complaint made by Edward Blyth about George Robert Gray, assistant in charge of birds at the museum. A response by Darwin, and 14 other referees, supported Gray's defence of his character, and the complaint was dismissed. It is concluded that Children investigated this complaint so vigorously because of recent criticism of the natural history collections by witnesses to the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the British Museum (1836–37), who sought to increase the involvement and influence of career scientists in the overseeing of the collections. Children may have also been sensitive to criticism because he was a controversial appointee.     

British Acoustics and its Transformation from the 1860s to the 1910s

Between the 1860s and the 1910s, British acoustics was transformed from an area of empirical research into a mathematically organized field. Musical motives—improving musical scales and temperaments, making better musical instruments, and understanding the nature of musical tones—were among the major driving forces of acoustical researchers in nineteenth-century Britain. The German acoustician, Helmholtz, had a major impact on British acousticians who also had extensive interactions with American and French acousticians. Rayleigh's acoustics, reflecting all these features, bore remarkable fruit in his treatise The Theory of Sound, which successfully subjected empirical acoustics to analytical mathematics. His accomplishments made British acoustics a subfield of physics, thus distinguishing it from the ‘new acoustics’ in early twentieth-century America.     

Astronomical and chronological calculations at Newminster in 1428

Oliver Heaviside and Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) stand in such contrast that the life of each serves to illuminate the life of the other. Thomson's talents, which were recognized at an early age, were cultivated with possibly unsurpassed educational opportunities, whereas Heaviside had scarcely any educational opportunities and was essentially self-taught. Nevertheless, Heaviside's published and unpublished works suggest that the breadth and depth of his learning were more or less comparable to Thomson's. Being an outstanding student at Cambridge brought Thomson in contact with scientists of the first rank, and he learned without effort how to get along with his peers. That pleasing quality was essentially absent in Heaviside, whose personality was as prickly as a porcupine, almost without grace. But underneath this rough exterior was a noble genius who never exploited his rare talents to his own advantage, but instead dedicated them to learning the Truth for its own sake. As to personal temperament, educational opportunities, professional and social activities, Heaviside and Thomson were poles apart. But they maintained a correspondence which is significant, and Thomson's assistance to Heaviside is noteworthy.     

The American Philosophical Society and the rise of astronomy in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century

Early geological investigations in the St David's area (Pembrokeshire) are described, particularly the work of Murchison. In a reconnaissance survey in 1835, he regarded a ridge of rocks at St David's as intrusive in unfossiliferous Cambrian; and the early Survey mapping (chiefly the work of Aveline and Ramsay) was conducted on that assumption, leading to the publication of maps in 1845 and 1857. The latter represented the margins of the St David's ridge as ‘Altered Cambrian’. So the supposedly intrusive ‘syenite’ was regarded as younger, and there was no Precambrian. These views were challenged by a local doctor, Henry Hicks, who developed an idea of the ex-Survey palaeontologist John Salter that the rocks of the ridge were stratified and had formed a Precambrian island, round which Cambrian sediments (now confirmed by fossil discoveries) had been deposited. Hicks subsequently proposed subdivision of his Precambrian into ‘Dimetian’, ‘Pebidian’, and (later) ‘Arvonian’, and he attempted correlations with rocks in Shropshire, North Wales, and even North America, seeking to develop the neo-Neptunist ideas of Sterry Hunt. The challenge to the Survey's work was countered in the 1880s by the Director General, Geikie, who showed that Hicks's idea of stratification in the Dimetian was mistaken. A heated controversy developed, several amateur geologists, supported by a group of Cambridge Sedgwickians, forming a coalition of ‘Archaeans’ against the Survey. Geikie was supported by Lloyd Morgan. Attention focused particularly on Ogof Lle-sugn Cave and St Non's Arch, with theory/controversy-ladenness of observations evident on both sides. Evidence from an eyewitness student record of a Geological Society meeting reveals the ‘sanit`ized’ nature of the official summary of the debate in QJGS. Field mapping early in the twentieth century by J. F. N. Green allowed a compromise consensus to be achieved, but Green's evidence for unconformity between the Cambrian and the Dimetian, obtained by excavation, can no longer be verified, and his consensual history of the area may need revision. Unconformity between the Cambrian and the Pebidian tuffs is not in doubt, however, and Precambrian at St David's is accepted. The study exhibits features of geological controversy and the British geological community in the nineteenth century. It also furnishes a further instance of the great influence of Murchison in nineteenth-century British geology and the side-effects of his controversy with Sedgwick.     

Chemist,entomologist, Darwinian,and man of affairs: Raphael Meldola and the making of a scientific career

In 1925 a debate erupted in the correspondence columns of the British Medical Journal concerning the effectiveness of eating raw pancreas as a treatment for diabetes. Enthusiasts were predominantly general practitioners (GPs), who claimed success for the therapy on the basis of their clinical impressions. Their detractors were laboratory‐oriented ‘biochemist‐physicians,’ who considered that their own experiments demonstrated that raw pancreas therapy was ineffective. The biochemist‐physicians consistently dismissed the GPs' observations as inadequately ‘controlled’. They did not define the meaning of ‘control’ in this context, although it clearly did not have the term's present‐day meaning of a trial employing an untreated comparison group of patients. Rather, the physician‐biochemists' ‘properly controlled’ experiments involved careful regulation of their patients' diet and other environmental factors, and evaluation of the therapy's success through biochemical, rather than just clinical, criteria. However, my analysis suggests that these factors alone are inadequate to account for the biochemist‐physicians' dismissal of the GPs' work as ‘uncontrolled’. I suggest that the biochemist‐physicians were deliberately exploiting the powerful rhetorical connotations of the term ‘control’. Ultimately, they implied that only a trial which they themselves had conducted could be deemed ‘adequately controlled’.     

Science,self improvement and the first industrial revolution

This study considers Newton's views on space and time with respect to some important ontologies of substance in his period. Specifically, it deals in a philosophico-historical manner with his conception of substance, attribute, existence, to actuality and necessity. I show how Newton links these “features” of things to his conception of God's existence with respect of infinite space and time. Moreover, I argue that his ontology of space and time cannot be understood without fully appreciating how it relates to the nature of Divine existence. In order to establish this, the ontology embodied in Newton's theory of predication is analysed, and shown to be different from the presuppositions of the ontological argument. From the historical point of view Gassendi's influence is stressed, via the mediation of Walter Charleton. Furthermore, Newton's thought on these matters is contrasted with Descartes's and Spinoza's. In point of fact, in his earliest notebook Newton recorded observations on Descartes's version of the ontological argument. Soon, however, he was to oppose the Cartesian conception of the actuality of Divine existence by means of arguments similar to those of Gassendi. Lastly, I suggest that the nature and extent of Henry More's influence on Newton's conception of how God relates to absolute space and time bears further examination.     

‘Land-marks of the universe’: John Herschel against the background of positional astronomy

John Herschel (1792–1871) was the leading British natural philosopher of the nineteenth century, widely known and regarded for his work in philosophy, optics and chemistry as well as his important research and popular publications on astronomy. To date, however, there exists no extended treatment of his astronomical career. This paper, part of a larger study exploring Herschel's contributions to astronomy, examines his work in the context of positional astronomy, the dominant form of astronomical practice throughout his lifetime. Herschel, who did not himself practice positional astronomy and who was known for his non-meridional observations of specific stellar objects, was nonetheless a strong advocate for positional astronomy—but for very different reasons than the terrestrial applications to which it was most often put. For Herschel, the star catalogues of positional astronomy were the necessary observational foundation upon which information about the stars as physical objects could be constructed. Positional astronomy practiced in the great national observatories was not about navigation or timekeeping; it was a way to standardize stellar observations and make them useful data for constructing theories of the stars themselves. For Herschel, the seeds of the new astronomy emerged from the practices of the old.     

Collecting airs and ideas: Priestley’s style of experimental reasoning

It has often been claimed that Priestley was a skilful experimenter who lacked the capacities to analyze his own experiments and bring them to a theoretical closure. In attempts to revise this view some scholars have alluded to Priestley’s ‘synoptic’ powers while others stressed the contextual role of British Enlightenment in understanding his chemical research. A careful analysis of his pneumatic reports, privileging the dynamics of his experimental practice, uncovers significant yet neglected aspects of Priestley’s science. By focusing on his early experimental conduct and writing on nitrous air, I demonstrate how his methodological and rhetorical devices, far from being consequences of compulsive writing or theoretical naïveté, were deeply entwined with his chemical research. I employ the notion of ‘style of experimental reasoning’ (SER)—derived from A. C. Crombie and I. Hacking—to shed light on the intersection at which Priestley’s unique method, literary style, and epistemology converged to generate scientific knowledge. Establishing Priestley’s SER advances a finer understanding of the interactive character of his pneumatic experimentalism, peculiar dimensions of which have evaded both traditional as well as revisionist scholarship, thus infusing the longstanding historiographic debate over his scientific merits.     

Feyerabend,truth, and relativisms: Footnotes to the Italian debate

There is a substantial literature on Feyerabend's relativism—including a few papers in this collection—but fewer specific studies of the ways that his writings and ideas have been taken up among the non-academic public. This is odd, given his obvious interest in the lives and concerns of persons who were not ‘intellectuals’—a term that, for him, had a pejorative ring to it. It is also odd, given the abundance of evidence of how Feyerabend's relativism played a role in a specific national and cultural context—namely, contemporary Italian debates about relativism. This paper offers a study of how Feyerabend's ideas have been deployed by Italian intellectuals and cultural commentators—including the current Pope—and critically assesses them.     

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

SUMMARY

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.     

Explicating formal epistemology: Carnap's legacy as Jeffrey's radical probabilism

Quine's “naturalized epistemology” presents a challenge to Carnapian explication: why try to rationally reconstruct probabilistic concepts instead of just doing psychology? This paper tracks the historical development of Richard C. Jeffrey who, on the one hand, voiced worries similar to Quine's about Carnapian explication but, on the other hand, claims that his own work in formal epistemology—what he calls “radical probabilism”—is somehow continuous with both Carnap's method of explication and logical empiricism. By examining how Jeffrey's claim could possibly be accurate, the paper suggests that Jeffrey's radical probabilism can be seen as a sort of alternative explication project to Carnap's own inductive logic. In so doing, it deflates both Quine's worries about Carnapian explication and so also, by extension, similar worries about formal epistemology.     

Chemistry and slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.     

Pictures and pedagogy: The role of diagrams in Feynman's early lectures

This paper aims to give a substantive account of how Feynman used diagrams in the first lectures in which he explained his new approach to quantum electrodynamics. By critically examining unpublished lecture notes, Feynman's use and interpretation of both “Feynman diagrams” and other visual representations will be illuminated. This paper will discuss how the morphology of Feynman's early diagrams were determined by both highly contextual issues, which molded his images to local needs and particular physical characterizations, and an overarching common diagrammatic style, which facilitated Feynman's movement between different diagrams despite their divergent forms and significance.     

Scientific patronage in the age of Darwin: The curious case of William Boyd Dawkins

This essay examines the curious relationship between Charles Darwin and the palaeontologist William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929). Dawkins was a beneficiary of Darwin's patronage and styled himself as a Darwinian to Darwin and the public, yet viciously attacked Darwin and his theory in anonymous reviews. This has confused historians who have misunderstood the exact nature of Dawkins's attitude towards evolution and his relationship to Darwin. The present study explains both the reasons for Dawkins's contradictory statements and his relationship with Darwin. I introduce Batesian mimicry as a conceptual framework to make sense of Dawkins's actions, suggesting that Dawkins mimicked a Darwinian persona in order to secure advancement in the world of Victorian science. Dawkins's pro-Darwinian stance, therefore, was a façade, an act of mimicry. I argue that Dawkins exploited Darwin for his patronage – which took the form of advice, support from Darwin's well-placed friends, and monetary assistance – while safely expressing his dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy in the form of anonymous reviews. This is, therefore, a case study in how scientific authority and power could be gained and maintained in Victorian science by professing allegiance to Darwin and Darwinism.     

The early history of ship magnetism: The Airy-Scoresby controversy

With the advent of iron-built ships in the early nineteenth century the problem of managing a magnetic compass on board presented considerable difficulty. Prominent among the early scientists who tackled the problem were George Biddell Airy and William Scoresby. Airy had provided a mechanical system, employing correctors in the form of steel magnets and wrought iron masses, by which the ship's magnetic field at the compass position is neutralized. He based his system on the concept that the magnetism acquired by an iron ship during her construction remained with the ship throughout her life. Scoresby, on the other hand, thought differently. After having conducted a thorough and systematic series of experiments on iron plates and bars, he concluded that the magnetic character of an iron ship is liable to sudden and unexpected change. Scoresby argued, therefore, that Airy's system was defective and, indeed, dangerous. The aim of this paper is to discuss the two views which brought Airy and Scoresby into a conflict which is documented in a series of letters to the editor of The Athenaeum.     

Freiberg and the Frontier: Louis Janin,German Engineering,and ‘Civilisation’ in the American West

Mining companies after the Gold Rush depended heavily on foreign expertise, and yet historians of mining have glorified ‘German engineering’ in America. The application of German technology in America was fraught with difficulties, and most advances were micro- rather than macro-innovations, such as Philip Deidesheimer's famous square-set timbering on the Comstock Lode. The problem began at German mining schools, such as the Freiberg Mining Academy, where Americans like Louis and Henry Janin, while they acquired advanced training and adopted an engineering ethos, struggled to learn about Mexican and American mining. Having complemented their course of study to remedy this deficiency, the brothers returned to the US intending to modernize mining on the frontier. Louis attempted the ‘Freiberg Process’ of amalgamation on the Comstock Lode, but locally developed methods proved more feasible, and the experiment failed. He came to apply his training rather toward the micro-level problem of how to reprocess amalgamation waste heaps.