This leading international journal publishes scholarly papers and review articles on all aspects of the history of science. History of science is interpreted widely to include medicine, technology and social studies of science. BJHS papers make important and lively contributions to scholarship and the journal has been an essential library resource for more than thirty years. It is also used extensively by historians and scholars in related fields. A substantial book review section is a central feature. There are four issues a year, comprising an annual volume of over 600 pages.
Research Articles
Mechanical experiments as moral exercise in the education of George III FLORENCE GRANT The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 195 – 212 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000582 (About doi) Published Online on 01st August 2014 In 1761, George III commissioned a large group of philosophical instruments from the London instrument-maker George Adams. The purchase sprang from a complex plan of moral education devised for Prince George in the late 1750s by the third Earl of Bute. Bute's plan applied the philosophy of Frances Hutcheson, who placed ‘the culture of the heart’ at the foundation of moral education. To complement this affective development, Bute also acted on seventeenth-century arguments for the value of experimental philosophy and geometry as exercises that habituated the student to recognizing truth, and to pursuing it through long and difficult chains of reasoning. The instruments required for such exercise thus became tools for manipulating moral subjectivity. By the 1730s there was a variety of established modes in which the Newtonian philosophy might be used to argue for the legitimacy of Hanoverian rule. The education of George III represents a less recognized iteration of this relationship, concerned not with public apologetics, but rather with the transformation of an ‘indolent’ youth into a virtuous monarch.
Sounding in silence: men, machines and the changing environment of naval discipline, 1796–1815 JAMES POSKETT The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 213 – 232 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000934 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd December 2014 Logbooks and sea charts may appear rather straightforward evidence to present at a naval court martial. However, their introduction into proceedings in the early nineteenth century reveals an important shift. Measuring the depth of water soon became a problem both of navigation and of discipline. Indeed, Captain Newcomb's knowledge of the soundings taken at the Battle of the Basque Roads proved crucial at Lord Gambier's court martial in June 1809. Through a case study of Edward Massey's sounding machine, this paper reveals the close connection between disciplinary practices on land and at sea. The Board of Longitude acted as a key intermediary in this respect. By studying land and sea together, this paper better explains the changing make-up of the British scientific instrument trade in this period. Massey is just one example of a range of new entrants, many of whom had little previous experience of the maritime world. More broadly, this paper emphasizes the role of both environmental history and material culture in the study of scientific instruments.
George Combe and common sense SEAN DYDE The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 233 – 259 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000922 (About doi) Published Online on 11th December 2014 This article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.
Catholics, science and civic culture in Victorian Belfast DIARMID A. FINNEGAN, JONATHAN JEFFREY WRIGHT The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 261 – 287 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000594 (About doi) Published Online on 01st August 2014 The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfast's intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science.
Sinanthropus in Britain: human origins and international science, 1920–1939 CHRIS MANIAS The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 289 – 319 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000909 (About doi) Published Online on 03rd November 2014 The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link – simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself – reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.
The Arabic original of (ps.) Māshā'allāh's Liber de orbe: its date and authorship TARO MIMURA The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 321 – 352 doi: 10.1017/S0007087414000910 (About doi) Published Online on 30th October 2014 Liber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (d. c.815), a court astrologer of the Abbasid dynasty, was one of the earliest Latin sources of Aristotelian physics. Until recently, its Arabic original could not be identified among Arabic works. Through extensive examination of Arabic manuscripts on exact sciences, I found two manuscripts containing the Arabic text of this Latin work, although neither of them is ascribed to Māshā'allāh: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. oct. 273, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania University Library, MS LJS 439. In this paper, I describe these two manuscripts in great detail, so that I confirm their originality of the Liber de orbe, and then by analysing the contents of the Arabic text, I deny the attribution to Māshā'allāh, and identify the title and author as Book on the Configuration of the Orb by Dūnash ibn Tamīm, a disciple of Isaac Israeli (c.855–c.955).
Essay Review
The shock of the odd Boris Jardine The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 353 – 356 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000047 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015 When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).
Book Reviews
Sylvia Sumira, The Art and History of Globes. London: The British Library, 2014. Pp. 224. ISBN 978-07-123-5868-2. £30.00 (hardback). Richard Dunn The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 357 – 358 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000059 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 398. ISBN 978-0-226-10656-4. $45.00/£31.50 (hardback). Anna Marie Roos The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 360 – 361 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000072 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-01729-7. £38.50 (hardback). Sachiko Kusukawa The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 361 – 362 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000084 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. London: Oneworld, 2014. Pp. 352. ISBN 978-1-78074-532-9. £20.00 (paperback). Michael J. Barany The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 362 – 364 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000096 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
William J. Turkel, Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 287. ISBN 978-1-4214-0981-8. £22.50 (hardback). James F. Stark The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 364 – 365 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000102 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 466. ISBN 978-0-231-14766-8. £34.50 (hardback); 978-0-231-51952-6. £34.50 (e-book).Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press, 2014. Pp. 284. ISBN 978-0-674-72871-4. £20.00 (hardback). Chris Renwick The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 365 – 367 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000114 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Margaret C. Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 257. ISBN 978-1-107-61983-8. £19.99 (paperback) Thomas Palmelund Johansen The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 367 – 368 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000126 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 306. ISBN 978-0-19-967526-5. £18.99 (hardback). David Knight The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 368 – 370 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000138 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (eds.), Evolution and Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 320. ISBN 978-1-107-02842-5. £60.00 (hardback). Gowan Dawson The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 370 – 371 doi: 10.1017/S000708741500014X (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
P.J. Capelotti, Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The Expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's Forgotten Arctic Explorer. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013. Pp. xxix + 269. ISBN 978-1-55238-705-4. US$41.95 (paperback). Peder Roberts The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 371 – 372 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000151 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Douglas A. Lorimer, Science, Race Relations and Resistance: Britain, 1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 344. ISBN 978-0-7190-3357-5. £80.00 (hardback). Efram Sera-Shriar The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 373 – 374 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000163 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Einstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 562. ISBN 978-0-521-82834-5. £65.00 (hardback). Rawaa Mahmoud Hussain The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 374 – 375 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000175 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Milena Wazeck, Einstein's Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s. Translated by Geoffrey S. Koby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-01744-3. £65.00/$99.00 (hardback). Jaume Navarro The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 375 – 377 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000187 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp. viii + 257. ISBN 978-1-84893-430-7. £60.00 (hardback). Andy Hammond The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 377 – 378 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000199 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich (eds.), Outsider Scientists: Routes to Innovation in Biology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 374. ISBN 978-0-226-07840-3. £24.50 (paperback). Dominic Berry The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 378 – 380 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000205 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double Helix. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 242. ISBN 978-0-19-870459-1. £18.99 (hardback). Kenneth E. Hendrickson The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 380 – 381 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000217 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 300. ISBN 978-0-226-08602-6. £24.50 (paperback). Daniele Cozzoli The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 381 – 382 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000229 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Ruha Benjamin, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 249. ISBN 978-0-8047-8297-5. £17.99 (paperback). Neil Singh The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 383 – 384 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000230 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Jed Z. Buchwald and Robert Fox (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 945. ISBN 978-0-19-969625-3. £95.00 (hardback). Cornelis Schilt The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 384 – 385 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000242 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015
Klaas van Berkel, Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 265. ISBN 978-142140936-8. £21.00 (paperback). Antonio Clericuzio The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 02 , June 2015, pp 359 – 360 doi: 10.1017/S0007087415000060 (About doi) Published Online on 29th April 2015