Annals of Science最新文献

The Cold War's bipolarity between the Free World and the Communist World was evident across diplomacy, literature, military competition. Science, where research and publications often reflected opposing ideologies, is undoubtedly a crucial area. Julian Huxley's Evolution in Action (1953), a scientific work on genetics, exemplifies the scientific outlook of the Free World. Under the auspices of Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, an American anti-communist organization helping with the resettlement of Chinese refugees, Huxley's Evolution in Action was translated by Xu Guansan and published in Hong Kong in 1953. Through Xu's translation, both the political image of Huxley and the political elements of Evolution were deliberately downplayed. For Xu, genetic knowledge was not merely an expression of political ideology but a means to promote his academic beliefs, particularly integrating historical studies with scientific disciplines. In this sense, Evolution lost the original political significance attributed to it by the Cold War bipolarity when it traveled to Hong Kong via translation. Examing Xu Guansan's translation of genetic knowledge complicates the history of science in Cold War Hong Kong by offering an aspect from the individual who reproduced the scientific work.

We reconstruct the events surrounding John Scott Russell's first observation of a solitary wave, which would become a foundational myth of both nonlinear wave theory and Scottish engineering science. We place the experiments in the context of the Scottish canals during the rise of steam locomotion and of Russell's attempts to establish a scientific reputation from a position that was both socially and intellectually marginal and financially insecure. We further examine the changing uses of Russell's account of his observation, in his own publications and afterward, including his bid for the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1838.

In the context of the 150th anniversary of Hermann Graßmann's death, the results of 50 years of recent Graßmann research, starting with Lewis's dissertation and his contribution to the Annals of Science, are reflected upon. The unexpected revision initiated by Schubring in 1996 of the research findings on the sources of Graßmann's mathematical creativity, which have been available since Friedrich Engel, is rejected as unfounded. New insights into the introduction of the negative in geometry and the significance of the concept of multiplication for Graßmann are presented. Biographical information about Graßmann's work receives a stronger contextualization, and a simplistic handling of material hermeneutics in the historiography of mathematics is criticized. As shown by the influence of Pestalozzi on mathematics education in Prussia in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the case of Justus and Hermann Graßmann, there are 'causally effective societal factors in the development of mathematics' [Hans Wußing, 'Externalismus - Internalismus', N.T.M., 15 (2007), [284-88]], which were historically intertwined with the inner-mathematical development potentials of their time.

This article uses the mythological figure of the satyr to examine European attitudes towards incorporating mythical creatures into zoology and, more broadly, to survey attempts to reconcile the relative status of myth vis-à-vis modern science. Evidence is used from the past five hundred years to argue for the longevity of these debates, which continue to repeat the same arguments based on the same sources. It is argued that scholars' attitudes towards Ancient civilizations play a significant role in explaining whether they decide to consider the satyr as the product of the imperfect observation of monkeys or as a creature on its own right.

In the summer of 1732, a young medical student named Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) journeyed through Sápmi. Just under two decades later, Lars Montin (1723-1778), a student of the now famous Uppsala professor Linnaeus, followed his teacher's footsteps. We will focus on the accounts that both naturalists gave of the parasitic reindeer warble fly Hypoderma tarandi. While Linnaeus integrated the life history of this fly with his image of Sámi pastoralism as representing a 'silver age' of humanity in tune with the balance of nature, Montin mused about ways in which the fly's damaging effects on reindeer could be weaponized to force the Sámi into 'productive' labour. As a consequence, Linnaeus's timeless conception of an economy of nature was infused by Montin with notions of historical development and an open future. We will suggest that the differing attitudes of Linneaus and Montin can be explained by changes in the political context - most notably an emerging effort to enforce national borders and fiscal regimes in Northern Scandinavia in the 1740s and 1750s. But the different attitudes they developed towards the reindeer warble fly also point to deeper connections between natural history practices and the writing of human histories.

In 1644, the Manchus, a Tungusic population from northeast Asia, conquered Ming China, establishing the Qing Empire. Four years later, Crimean Tartar horsemen joined a major uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, gravely destabilizing one of Europe's largest states. These near-simultaneous incursions by ostensibly nomadic, horse-riding 'Tartars' into firearm-defended sedentary states generated extensive historiographical reflection on the role of nomads and their warhorse-centred armies in shaping human history. This article explores how the Jesuit Martino Martini drew on these Tartar wars to articulate a dialectical theory of human history, oscillating between civilization and barbarism, respectively embodied by agriculturalism and nomadic-pastoralism. Such theories, I argue, emerged in dialogue with pressing concerns about military security in metropolitan Europe. Indeed, the shock of the near-simultaneous Tartar wars spurred European writers to critically examine their own states' defences, contributing to controversies between Ancient and Modern military technologies. As this article shows, several Europeans came to construe Tartars simultaneously as 'barbarians' and a source of valuable martial expertise to be studied and selectively appropriated.

From the late nineteenth century, European ideas about African cattle breeds relied on the racial classification of African peoples, routed through Hamitic theory. As it were, anthropology influenced the reconstruction of cattle history, and the study of cattle breeds affected perceptions of race. The methods employed to classify African cattle included a range of sources with regards to past human migrations. Through the work of Hellmut Epstein, I detail how the Afrikander cattle breed was seen to signify the spread of an ancient white cultural influence in Africa. Comparisons from West Africa eventually challenged the historical premise of the breed's classification.

In 1695 the fossils of a woodland elephant were excavated in Burgtonna (Thuringia). This article deals with the debate between Gotha's court historiographer Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel (1659-1707), who interpreted the discovery as the remains of an elephant, and the collegium medicum of Gotha, that insisted that it was a lusus naturae. The debate, in which scholars throughout Europe soon became involved, is paradigmatic for the social, professional, epistemological and religious frames that determined what around 1700 one could say and think about the history of the earth and the role humans played in it. While Tentzel, as a specialist in human history, proved that the findings of fossilized exotic animals could not be explained by human intervention and argued for the Deluge as an agent of transport, for some of his correspondents inconsistencies between human history and the history of Nature emerged at this point, and time itself became an issue. The study emphasizes the importance of regional historiography for the understanding of nature as well as the transformation of history of Nature into natural history.

A manuscript now in Bamberg preserves the only surviving fragment of a thirteenth-century treatise on comets or 'new stars', which was written as a letter addressed by an unknown Dominican author to the Master General of his order, John of Vercelli. The present article offers the first discussion of this forgotten work, which was composed in the year after the Great Comet of 1264. Although most of the text has been lost, the inclusion of a geometrical diagram in the manuscript makes it possible to reconstruct a crucial part of its overall argument. The Dominican author was openly critical of the Aristotelian doctrine of comets as atmospheric phenomena and considered the possibility that reliable distance estimates might instead place such objects in the celestial realm. His geometrical investigation of this question is historically significant for containing the earliest known analysis of the effect of cometary distance on its observable parallax, thus anticipating aspects of Johannes Regiomontanus's seminal 16 Problems on comets.