Notes and Records

In 1743 Francis Hauksbee the Younger published a proposal for an ‘Experimentum Crucis’ (‘decisive experiment’) to compare his own medication for venereal disease with other treatments. Previously he had sought to replicate the methods of James Jurin FRS, who published outcomes from inoculation against smallpox in the 1720s. By seeking to record outcomes (‘Safety and Efficacy’) of his medicine used by local doctors, Hauksbee aimed ‘to lay the Whole of the Evidence (both for and against [his medicine]) properly attested before the Publick’. Owing to lack of engagement from doctors and bitter allegations of quackery, Hauksbee then proposed his ‘decisive experiment’ in ten practical steps. This called for twelve patients, half of whom would receive Hauksbee’s medication and the remaining half treatments of other doctors. Hauksbee insisted that patient outcomes be independently assessed and that the findings for all twelve be published, specifically long-term clinical outcomes (a ‘lasting cure’). Hauksbee’s proposal is an early model for a prospective controlled trial with patients allocated to two or more groups. The date of publication, subject (venereal disease), twelve participants, and importance of considering patients’ diet and accommodation suggest that Hauksbee’s proposal was the inspiration for James Lind’s 1747 trial of treatments for scurvy.

On the tenth anniversary of his passing and the hundredth anniversary of his birth, this article honours Josué A. Núñez (1924–2014), a pioneering Argentine biologist remembered for his groundbreaking work in insect physiology and behaviour. Núñez’s seminal papers are recognized for their rigorous experimentation and his skill in crafting instruments. Known for his humility and sense of humour, he taught and conducted research at prestigious institutions worldwide. The article traces Núñez’s career through key milestones, beginning with his foundational studies in insect anatomy and physiology. It then explores his formative years in Buenos Aires, where he conducted innovative independent experiments, and his influential early career research in Germany. Núñez’s initial interest in the relationship between flowers and honeybees developed into a profound exploration at the intersection of biology, evolutionary theory, and engineering principles. A major focus of this tribute is his integration of engineering concepts to examine the roles of honeybees as both nectar carriers and information channels. By emphasizing Núñez’s meticulous data analysis and systemic approach, the article not only highlights his significant contributions but also challenges traditional Eurocentric perspectives, advocating for a more inclusive understanding of global scientific achievements.

This study traces the intricate journey of Newtonian mechanics in Qing China from 1727 to 1912, elucidating the complex interplay of science, religion and politics in cross-cultural knowledge exchange. Initially introduced by Jesuit missionaries through lunar theory in calendrical reform, followed by cometary and heliocentric concepts, the dissemination of Newtonian mechanics gained momentum after the Opium Wars (1839–1842). Subsequently, Protestant missionaries and Chinese scholars collaborated to translate and propagate Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion, often contextualized within natural theology, through Western texts, popular science literature, and periodicals. This process culminated in the integration of Newtonian principles into national educational curricula in the early twentieth century. Significantly, Newtonian mechanics transcended its scientific realm, infiltrating political discourse as reformist thinkers leveraged mechanical terminology to advocate for sociopolitical change. This historical episode illustrates how the assimilation of Newtonian mechanics was influenced by missionary approaches, indigenous intellectual traditions, pragmatic national interests, and the tumultuous political landscape of Late Qing. By challenging Eurocentric narratives and highlighting Chinese agency in adapting Western knowledge, this study contributes to a more inclusive history of Newtonian science, offering a nuanced perspective on global scientific circulation.

This paper examines Henry Power’s Experimental philosophy and suggests that Power’s observations of and experiments with plants were not used to reconcile Cartesian corpuscularianism with different approaches that stress the subtle character of matter. Instead, their purpose was rather to determine the nature of seeds and their role in the process of plant generation, i.e. whether they are containers of the ultimate division of matter (atoms) or parts of matter endowed with formative power. My argument starts with a discussion of Power’s presentation on the role of seeds in the process of plant generation in his Experimental philosophy. I claim that Power compares plant seeds to atoms, and that he does not strictly interpret seeds/atoms in the Cartesian corpuscularian and mechanical fashion. Power’s ‘atoms’ are of two kinds—subtle and grosser—where the subtle has the property to trigger natural processes. Moreover, I interpret seeds as parts of matter endowed with creative properties as an addition to the preformist interpretation of Power’s position on plant generation.

This article brings to light correspondence between Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) and Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871) from the Royal Society archives. The 1848 letters reveal the extent of her contribution to an article authored by her husband, William King, Lord Lovelace (1805–1893), on the role of climate on crop growth. This involvement uncovers little-known facets of her scientific pursuits: her interest in the application of photography to meteorological instrumentation, her budding study of astronomy, and her development of mathematical treatments to model the environmental conditions required for plants to grow. The exchange situates Ada Lovelace in the larger context of Victorian science and reflects more widely on the complicated access of women to institutional science.

Measuring the amount of water in the air has been one of the most challenging of routine tasks in meteorology. From the 1650s onwards the methods involved either the uptake of moisture by organic materials such as human hair and whalebone (hygrometry) or the measurement of cooling due to loss of latent heat during evaporation (psychrometry). In 1792 James Hutton reported that a thermometer previously moistened by water records a lower temperature when exposed to cooling in the wind. This led to the development of the first condensation hygrometer by John Leslie in 1801 based on wet- and dry-bulb thermometers, whose design was refined and improved throughout the nineteenth century. Determining relative and absolute humidity values from a hygrometer required the use of a psychrometric equation, first developed by James Ivory in 1822 and later refined by Ernst Ferdinand August, James Apjohn and many others. Modern-day determinations of humidity often involve an aspirated psychrometer located in a Stevenson screen, whose origin can be traced directly back to Hutton’s observation of cooling due to evaporation. An extensive review of the literature on psychrometry records only cursory and ill informed acknowledgement of Hutton’s contribution. This article reasserts Hutton’s seminal role in the history of psychrometry.

This article explores two aspects of Aydın Sayılı’s scholarship: his focus on astrology and the impact of nationalist sentiments on his research. Sayılı, perhaps the first globally recognized PhD-holder in history of science, completed his degree at Harvard in the early 1940s and established Turkey’s first academic chair in the field at the University of Ankara. His works addressed both international and local audiences, advancing the history of mathematics and astronomy in Islamic societies; his scholarship on Islamic observatories is still highly esteemed today. This study highlights Sayılı’s integration of astrology into discussions in the history of science, especially with respect to Islamic observatories, a significant choice in an era when astrology and related disciplines received minimal attention in Turkish historiography. While his approach to this discipline diverges from that of prevalent twentieth-century Turkish scholarship, Sayılı’s motivations were deeply intertwined with the nationalist sentiments of the early Turkish Republic, emphasizing ‘Turkish contributions to science’. His scholarship invites further examination of the intricate relationship between the historiography of science and nationalism, as well as of twentieth-century historicizations of astrological studies.

Though he is nearly forgotten today, Dr Richard Davies (FRS 1738–41) was an innovative medical writer, a controversial educational reformer, and a path-breaking haematologist. His research on the composition of human blood, especially the formation of a ‘buffy coat’ in fevers, anticipated the better-known work of William Hewson and may have contributed a greater understanding of the behaviour of blood in health and disease, the effects of inflammation, and the outcomes of venesection. Davies had hoped that his works would contribute to a larger discussion made possible by a new community of better-educated medical researchers, but his ambition was thwarted, his claim to intellectual property was ridiculed, and his work did not receive the credit it deserved. This article reviews Davies’s life and works and suggests some explanations for his obscurity.

This article presents Alfredo Magalhães Ramalho’s scientific correspondence between 1919 and 1949, both nationally and internationally. It consists of 181 unpublished letters, exchanged with 30 relevant figures belonging to 11 countries, including France, the UK, Croatia, Japan, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Morocco, Belgium and Spain. This correspondence shows a network among different research institutions devoted to the marine sciences. This includes biological stations, such as the Istituto Italo-Germanico di Biologia Marina, laboratories and museums, e. g. the British Museum of Natural History. At the national level, the correspondence between Ramalho and Augusto Nobre represents a historical axis between Lisbon and Porto, involving two of the most relevant scientists in the fields of oceanography and marine biology. At the international level, Ramalho corresponded with personalities such as Henry Gascoyne Maurice and other members of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, including for example the oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman. This correspondence represents an archival discovery of the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere in Lisbon, marking a decisive historical scientific moment for both Portuguese and international contexts in the field of marine sciences. This article aims to reconstruct Portugal’s internal and external networks.

The article provides a quantitative survey of the ways in which individual stars were identified in astronomical articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London between 1665 and 1829. The great majority of stellar references fall into one or more of the following four categories: figural references (identifying objects as structural parts of constellation figures), proper names, Bayer letters, and catalogue numbers (primarily, Flamsteed numbers). The survey investigates how the quantities and proportions of these referential types changed over time, and what identification patterns each referential type displayed. The results are interpreted under the assumption that the dynamics of the mixture of practices were not only a matter of convenience and increasing practicality, but that they were also tied to underlying transformations in the conceptual identity of fixed stars. The gradual, spontaneous, and unreflected disappearance of figural identifications, and their replacement with references to designated catalogue entries, is tied to a transition from sidereal identity—stars being position markers in the celestial sphere—to stellar identity belonging to spatially distributed physical bodies.

In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave a long speech with the unequivocal title ‘The proofs for the existence of God in the light of modern natural science’, dealing with the relationship between modern science, Thomism and theology. The event was widely reported in the British press partly because the only living scientist quoted in that discourse was the Edinburgh emeritus professor of mathematics and convert to Catholicism, Edmund T. Whittaker (1873–1956), who was, in the 1930s and 1940s, producing his own corpus on the then-popular subject of science and religion. In this article, using the vast and unexplored correspondence between Whittaker and his son, the mathematician John M. Whittaker (1905–1984), I shall explore his thoughts and popular works, in which he mixed modern physics and mathematics, philosophy, apologetics, and theology. Whittaker is well known among historians of science for his A history of the theories of aether and electricity, the work of a hard-working, self-trained history aficionado. Similarly, after his conversion (in 1930, at the age of 57), Whittaker started reading and forming his own views around the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, Thomism. The core idea with which he justified his conversion and which would be the backbone of his speculations on natural theology was ‘sacramentality’. With it, he thought he could bridge the gap between mathematics, modern physics, and religion, and all with a sui generis embrace of Thomism.

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) was elected FRS in 1896 based on his contributions to applied mathematics. His contributions to biometry, eugenics, and other areas of applied statistics largely came later. This research note describes patterns in Pearson’s publishing behaviour: which venues he chose for his work, and how these choices compare with choices made by peers of similar standing at the same institution. This note quantifies patterns in choice for publishing venues for Pearson, both for his whole bibliography and for the subset of his bibliography associated with biometry and eugenics. This analysis indicates that Pearson relied to a high degree on publishing through venues either solely or primarily under his own editorial control. That pattern of publishing is a significant outlier compared with our sample of peers of similar local standing in the University of London. These results suggest the considerable potential for more detailed studies of publishing patterns by senior university researchers.

This article explores John Aubrey's (1627–1697) extensive use of astrology in his biographical collection Brief Lives (1680–1681), which has been widely celebrated for its vivid portrayal of seventeenth-century English culture and society. Aubrey's life writing was not only informed by his antiquarian pursuits, the vibrant coffee house culture of his time and his lively scientific community, but also by the practice of astrology. Through Aubrey's horoscope collection, Collectio geniturarum (1674–1690), and his correspondence with a wide astrological network, this article traces his deep engagement with the practice. In squarely focusing on these two sources, I argue that Aubrey greatly relied on astrological methods to inform his life writing. In making his collection of horoscopes, Aubrey drew on a long tradition of astrological data gathering. Aubrey's careful collation and calculation of data to verify birth times, identify major life events and determine ‘ingenious’ traits also contributed to a wider effort to reform astrology considering the nascent experimental philosophy. By examining Aubrey's multifaceted astrological writings, this article clarifies one of Aubrey's key techniques used in his early sketches of Brief Lives. More broadly, it further complicates the historical narrative that astrology was largely marginalized in late seventeenth-century English intellectual and scientific communities.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) is commonly credited for introducing the term cell into biology when describing the microscopic structure of plant tissues in his Micrographia of 1665. This narrative ignores that, at the time, cell was an established term denoting linearly arranged elements of structures with functions in the storage, modification and transport of materials (e.g. the uterus, colon, brain, etc.). In analogy to the cells of these organs, Hooke interpreted plant cells as elements of continuous tubes for the storage and regulated movement of vital fluids. Hooke also was one of the few British natural philosophers who regarded ‘serpentine-stones’, the fossilized chambered shells of cephalopods (e.g. ammonites) that seemed to lack living counterparts, as remnants of organisms. He considered Nautilus a living serpentine-stone and referred to the chambers in its shell as cells, postulating that gas and liquid were transported along and stored within these cavities for buoyancy regulation. Hooke published this theory in 1696, but probably developed it much earlier. In Micrographia, he described ammonite cells just before plant cells, suggesting an overlooked rhetoric function of his report of cells in plants. By visualizing microscopic equivalents of macroscopic cellular structures for the first time, Hooke reinforced the common notion that living matter generally was characterized by such structures. Consequently, the presence of cells in serpentine-stones implicitly supported his organismic interpretation of these fossils.

In this article we consider technical development and its role in digital humanities research efforts. We critique the concept that ‘novel’ development is crucial for innovation and tie this thinking to the corporatization of higher education. We suggest instead that sustainable technical development practices require a combination of need, creativity and reuse of existing technical infrastructure. First, we present our theory of ‘slow’ development based on this need-driven approach, then demonstrate how this theory can be applied to digital humanities research efforts using the Davy Notebooks Project as a case study. By tracing the history of this multi-phase, public crowdsourcing project and exposing the decision-making process behind its technical development, we demonstrate the promise and possibility of the ‘slow’ method proposed. When read in conjunction with the other essays in this special issue, we hope that this article will demonstrate how digital humanities methods and technical infrastructure can support and sustain traditional modes of scholarship, and the importance of applying the same careful approach to technical development that is applied to research methods more broadly.

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was (almost) universally acknowledged that Humphry Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution on chemistry, electro-chemistry and geology, among other subjects, were by far the most attractive scientific spectacle in London. Much has been written about the popularity, the fashionability, the attractiveness and the patriotism (in time of war) of Davy's lectures. When Davy, aged 22, arrived in London in March 1801 he had never previously delivered a lecture, but within two months he had made his mark in the Royal Institution's new large lecture theatre, so much so that he immediately repeated his first course. How did his experimental demonstrations, full of spectacular sensory experience (noise, smell, light, touch) convey his scientific rhetoric? What resources, material and human, did he draw on? In this paper I will seek to understand how Davy constructed his practice as a lecturer and how it related to his chemical researches. As well as using Davy's lecture notes (now available through the Davy Notebooks Project), I will draw on the notes taken by some of his auditors, their comments in diaries and letters as well as administrative records and contemporary newspaper accounts.

In this essay I argue that Humphry Davy uses the figure of Proteus to illustrate his conception of a world in a state of perpetual change. Over the past four years, 11 417 pages of Davy's notebooks have been transcribed by more than 3500 volunteers from around the world. These have revealed the extent of Davy's poetic output and confirmed his world view that matter is constantly being made, unmade, and made again in new forms. For Davy, atoms are drawn dynamically towards and away from each other, forging new entities through the power of heat, cold, and other chemical interventions. Here, I look at specific instances where Davy's poetry and science are in close proximity to each other, on the same notebook page or in the same notebook, paying attention to Davy's interest in the so-called ‘proteus' fish, which was thought to be able to adapt to life on land or sea at will. Davy saw the mythological figure Proteus as a symbol for chemical change and for the changes that all matter goes through. I will also use this trope to discuss the development of Davy’s ideas from notebook to lecture and published page.

The words ‘Antarctic science’ are often synonymous with dramatic, sublime images of penguins and frozen landscapes, but not all Antarctic science looks to the ice or its megafauna. While Antarctica is an important focus of scientific research in its own right, it is also a platform ideally suited to the pursuit of geophysical science—such as solar–terrestrial physics. Investigating the histories of these fields of science contributes not only to our understanding of the history of Antarctic science, but also to the evolution of Antarctic research stations as sites entangled in international networks of people and places beyond Earth's coldest continent. This paper presents the case of Halley VI research station, a British Antarctic Survey station on the Brunt Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, and its co-evolution with geospace science throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Halley's infrastructure and science shaped, and were shaped by, the evolution of geospace science in this period, via Halley's involvement in a series of international geospace collaborations. This co-evolution also affected how the British Antarctic Survey was able to respond to changing UK science policies in later decades. This case demonstrates that Antarctic stations, while physically remote, have historically been entangled in complex networks of people, politics and science that range far beyond Antarctica itself.

This essay considers an early eighteenth-century quarrel about the geographical dimensions of Paris and London. The dispute involved representatives of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris and the Royal Society in London. The three participants—Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726), Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771) and Peter Davall (?–1763)—were French, the first two resident in Paris, the third an exiled Huguenot based in London. From an initial, relatively trivial, confusion about trigonometrical calculations, this inconclusive debate ultimately embraced several wider questions about the nature of cities in classical antiquity and early eighteenth-century Europe, the changing meaning of urban life on the eve of the industrial age, the relationship between population size and urban space, and the relative economic, political and cultural vitality of Catholic absolutist France and Protestant Hanoverian England. Informed by rival claims promoted by Cartesians and Newtonians in London and Paris, the dispute also reflected a pre-existing tension within the Paris Academy about the remit of established and emerging scientific disciplines, specifically astronomy and geography. Subsequent cartographic representations of these two cities, including the Plan Turgot of Paris in the 1730s and the Rocque map of London in the 1740s, can be re-considered with reference to this now forgotten controversy.

As a result of trade and commerce in global empires, plants from around the world could be found growing in gardens throughout Europe, including Germany. Johann Sigismund Elsholtz (1623–1688), a member of the Leopoldina scientific academy, would never personally travel to the Americas or Asia, but he had direct experience with plants from abroad under his care in the pleasure gardens of Berlin. Elsholtz composed several editions of a work that focused on the role of climate in growing a garden. For it was the climate, and not so much the soil, that posed the most significant challenge for the gardens he supervised, especially for the foreign plants. Curiously, Elsholtz's work is selective on which plants it categorizes as foreign; the category is also malleable, and proper acclimation of a plant was a first step for it no longer to be called foreign. In this paper, I explore the question of how plants lose their foreignness and take on a new, domestic meaning.

This special issue focuses on the complex cultural connections between Japanese and British science in the nineteenth century. This was a period when intellectuals around the globe began to interact more intensively due to increased opportunities to travel and the growth in translations of important scientific works into many languages. This was also an era when, in the latter part of the century, Japanese intellectuals were searching for ways to modernize their culture, while in Britain there was a renewed interest in Japanese culture and religion as traditional forms of thought were being questioned. Although there has been some excellent scholarly work on the impact of British evolutionary theory on Japanese intellectuals, the fuller picture of cultural exchange across all the sciences has yet to be undertaken. This special issue will begin to close this historiographical gap by examining the intersection of nineteenth-century Japanese and British science across a range of disciplines from engineering, chemistry and physics to biology, sociology and anthropology.

Between 1889 and 1891, the Christian physicist Kimura Shunkichi strove to persuade his non-religious pupils at the First Higher Middle School that nature was harmonious, while encouraging his fellow Christians to enhance their belief by assimilating the accomplishments of contemporary science, especially the theory of evolution. The arguments of British scientists regarding the relationship between science and religion, particularly those after 1859, emerged as a substantial resource for Kimura's endeavour to convince his distinct audiences. Kimura astutely appropriated the discourses of various British scientists—ranging from the eighth Duke of Argyll to John Tyndall—in his physics course for humanities pupils and his lecture on evolution at a church in Yokohama, to effectively address the sensitivities of each group. Consequently, Kimura's lectures and publications during this period reveal a previously unknown connection between the acceptance of evolutionism in Japan and the contemporary British debates, underscoring the meticulous approach he adopted in employing these resources both in a national educational institution and within the church.