British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm's eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon's thought. Sturm's reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm's salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.

Sir Albert Howard helped popularize the idea of translating 'Eastern' practice into 'Western' science in the field of agriculture. His approach to composting has been foundational to organic farming and counterposed with the field of agricultural chemistry. This depiction of feuding ideologies - organic versus chemical - is based largely on Howard's opposition to the fragmentation of scientific knowledge and its products, especially artificial fertilizer. One underexplored aspect of Howard's contest with the agricultural research establishment is the role played by intellectual property. This article contributes to Howard's historiography by examining three topics related to his life's work that concern money and patents: (1) the financial support for the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, (2) an artificial manure patented by employees at Rothamsted Experimental Station and (3) a rival method in British municipal composting. I argue that Howard's ideological difference with agricultural chemists was not reducible to generating soil fertility with compost. Rather, the feud consisted of a larger debate about innovation, ownership and the societal benefits of scientific research.

The maritime expansion of the early modern period and the discovery of new continents necessitated a profound revision in traditional cosmology, bringing into question the millennia-old practices that were framed around that cosmology. Among these practices was astrology, which in the early modern period reached an unprecedented level of popularity through the development of the printing press. The application of the astrological corpus in tropical and southern latitudes questioned many of the foundational Ptolemaic concepts. At the core of this problem was the reversal of the seasons in the southern hemisphere. Since Ptolemy had firmly grounded the natural explanation of astrological attributes of the zodiac and the planets on the seasonal qualities, their reversal would imply a complete change in the zodiacal and planetary properties. Authors such as Girolamo Cardano, Tommaso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher addressed this matter, but it never became a central point of debate in the astrological literature of the period. However, practitioners in the New World, whose empirical view was very different to that of European authors, reached different conclusions. This problem offers an example of the difficulty in reconciling traditional authority with new knowledge. At the same time, it exposes the sharp contrast between the theoretical perspective of Europe-based authors and the actual experience of astrologers practising in the New World.

This essay examines the working relationship between Charles Darwin and the Edinburgh gardener John Scott that developed in the wake of the publishing of the Origin of Species (1859). As the essay shows, Darwin sought to utilize Scott's horticultural knowledge and experimental expertise in order to provide some of the specialized botanical evidence that the Origin was not intended to provide. Scott, meanwhile, sought to use Darwin's patronage and tutelage in order to overcome his modest status as a gardener while making contributions to scientific knowledge. And for an intense two-year period (1862-4), Darwin and Scott's relationship was productive and mutually beneficial: not only did Scott's work supplement Darwin's ongoing botanical research on sexual development and fertility, but also his Primula experiments appeared to provide 'physiological' evidence of speciation via selective breeding. What the essay argues, however, is that there were limits to what Scott was able to achieve due in part to his social standing and perceived character that ultimately cast a shadow over his findings.

This article interrogates the positioning of British colonial meteorology in Malaysia and Singapore from the 1940s to 1960. This period spanned a global conflict and an internecine war, effecting profound sociopolitical changes from which neither Malaysia nor Singapore would emerge the same. The meteorological services were essential to Britain's armed conflicts, providing vital weather information to the army, navy and, especially, the air forces, as well as supporting the aviation and shipping industry often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. This article argues that British military policy in South East Asia and the specific concerns of the colonial government in Malaya directly commanded the meteorological agenda on the ground during this period, with a secondary but significant impact on tropical climate and weather research. It thus addresses the interplay of science, colonialism and military interest from the perspective of a region that has featured little in the history of science.

This article examines the scientific legacy of the first Glasgow Botanic Gardens and the part they played in the global circulation of botanical knowledge, from their creation in 1817 to their relocation to the West End of Glasgow in 1841. Located in a thriving industrial city with strong commercial ties to the British Caribbean, the gardens stood at an important crossroads of political and economic interests, scientific discovery, cultural innovation and imperial motives. They were managed by the talented English botanist William Jackson Hooker, who strove to transform them into a training ground for prospective botanists and a leading scientific institution. Yet, like many other botanical establishments of similar stature at the time, the gardens encountered many financial setbacks that hampered their success and threatened the scientific ambitions of Hooker and his peers. This article discusses the extent of the gardens' scientific contribution within and beyond the borders of Britain and seeks to determine the degree to which science in these gardens was constrained by economic factors.

Selenography was both a practice and a tool which developed through optical instrumentation in the seventeenth century. As a practice, it was the process of creating composite graphical depictions of the Moon through skill and sustained telescopic study. As a paper-based tool, the focus of this article, a selenography was a stabilized visualization and codified template for making, organizing and communicating lunar-based astronomical observations. The template's key observation and notation device was its system of named Moon spots, or lunar nomenclatures. Such systems varied significantly in different sites of knowledge making. Through the close study of two naming schemes produced and exchanged in Counter-Reformation contexts by Michael van Langren (1645) and Giovanni Battista Riccioli in collaboration with Maria Francesco Grimaldi (1651), this essay argues that selenographies were conceived with an eye to ideals of universal standardization for collective and even global observation. In practice, however, different forms of universality, revealing distinct local agendas tied to political and religious priorities, were materialized in each competing scheme.

Arguing about the stars has rarely been more controversial and dangerous than in the early modern period in Europe, especially in Catholic countries, in a time when old and novel conceptions of the heavens, planetary models and theories of celestial motions and influences were intensely debated, revised and scrutinized for philosophical soundness and religious conformity. In the hundred years or so that witnessed the birth and censorship of the Copernican theory; the execution in Rome of the most passionate defender of post-Copernican cosmology, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), and the rise and fall of Galileo Galilei's (1564-1642) fame linked to his novel interpretation of the book of nature, the Catholic Church created some of the most powerful instruments of cultural control and educational conformity ever seen: the Inquisition, the Index of Forbidden Books and the vast network of Jesuit schools that spread from Rome and the Iberian peninsula across the globe.

As an industrial science, vaccinology is susceptible to changing social, economic and political frameworks. This article reconstructs the history of the birth of the Sabin strains-derived inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV) in China. The development of this nascent vaccine can be attributed first and foremost to the circulation of knowledge and technology in the global polio research network of the 1980s, before the privatization of vaccine manufacturing and the escalation of intellectual-property protections. Tracing correspondence between Jonas Salk and a Chinese scientist, Jiang Shude, and his colleagues, we chart how institutional efforts in search of a profitable product and scientists' motives in pursuing personal careers in the post-socialist reform era led to collaboration on many levels, centered around polio vaccines. In response to recent polio history research, we also emphasize the impact of multiple temporalities of polio dramaturgy on the vaccine manufacturer, as this article demonstrates how the confluence of shifting global polio eradication agendas and contingencies in complex vaccinology undertakings ironically helped to materialize the idea of the sIPV. Finally, stories of vaccines and scientists in China add compelling subplots to the global polio history, which reveals the need to reconsider the politicization of imported technology in broader socialist contexts.A letter dated '3 June 1986' was mailed from Jonas Salk to Jiang Shude (). Jiang had been an unknown vaccinologist working at the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in Flower Red Cave in the Western Hills of Kunming, in south-western China. Salk had visited two years earlier to discuss the feasibility of the IMB's proposal to manufacture inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). The initial collaborative plan had come to a halt by the time Salk wrote the letter to Jiang; still, he kindly offered Jiang an opportunity to travel to Bilthoven and then Lyon to learn IPV-related technology with a generous $10,000 grant for his one-year stay in Europe.