The origin, character, and reception of the Development Act of 1909 are described. Extant evaluations of its historical significance are presented and criticized. It is claimed that the significance of the Act for the promotion of scientific research in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry has been largely overlooked. The way in which the Commissioners of the Act interpreted their brief by establishing scholarships, new research institutes, and developing existing institutes is described.

The late nineteenth century gradually witnessed a liberalization of the kinds of mathematical object and forms of mathematical reasoning permissible in physical argumentation. The construction of theories of units illustrates the slow and difficult spread of new “algebraic” modes of mathematical intelligibility, developed by leading mathematicians from the 1830s onwards, into elementary arithmetical pedagogy, experimental physics, and fields of physical practice like telegraphic engineering. A watershed event in this process was a clash that took place during 1878 between J. D. (...) Everett and James Thomson over the meaning and algebraic manipulation of dimensional formulae. This precipitated the emergence of rival “Maxwellian” and “Thomsonian” approaches towards interpreting and applying “dimensional” equations, which expressed the relationship between derived and fundamental units in an absolute system of measurement. What at first looks like a dispute over a seemingly esoteric mathematical tool for unit conversion turns out to concern Everett’s break with arithmetical algebra in the representation and manipulation of physical quantities. This move prompted a vigorous rebuttal from Thomsonian defenders of an orthodox “arithmetical empiricism” on epistemological, semantic, or pedagogical grounds. Their resistance in Victorian Britain to a shift in mathematical intelligibility is suggestive of the difficult birth of theoretical physics, in which the intermediate steps of a mathematical argument need have no direct physical meaning. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the 'transformation of biology' in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as 'equal though different'. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum-more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the 'naturalist' and the 'experimentalist' was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the ‘transformation of biology’ in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as ‘equal though different’. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum—more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘experimentalist’ was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

In 1875 T. H. Huxley discovered that a secretion from the mouldpenicillium glaucumhad an ability, unconnected with oxygen deprivation, to inhibit bacterial growth. He recorded his observations in his notebooks and in a single letter to John Tyndall, who at that time was a friend of Lister and a correspondent of Pasteur. Neither Huxley nor Tyndall looked for an explanation of this phenomenon, and neither told anyone else about it.

When the journal Minerva was founded in 1962, science and higher educational issues were high on the agenda, lending impetus to the interdisciplinary field of “Science Studies” qua “Science Policy Studies.” As government expenditures for promoting various branches of science increased dramatically on both sides of the East-West Cold War divide, some common issues regarding research management also emerged and with it an interest in closer academic interaction in the areas of history and policy of science. Through a close reading (...) of many early issues of Minerva but also of its later competitor journal Science Studies (now called Social Studies of Science) the paper traces the initial optimism of an academically based Science Studies dialogue across the Cold War divide and the creation in 1971 of the International Commission for Science Policy Studies as a bridging forum, one that Minerva strangely chose to ignore. In this light, attention is drawn to aspects of the often forgotten history of Science Studies in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European block. Reviewed also are several early discussions that are still relevant today: e.g., regarding differing concepts of Big Science, science and democracy, autonomy in higher education and what conditions are necessary to sustain academic freedom and scientific integrity (some of Edward Shils’ primary concerns). Finally, it is noted how the question of quantitative methods to measure scientific productivity lay at the heart of a “Science of Science” movement of the 1960s has re-emerged in a new form integral to the notion of a “Science of Science Policy.”. (shrink)

During the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man , Tylor's research on the early history of mankind , Renan's Vie de Jésus , Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia , and Swinburne's notorious (...) Atalanta in Calydon ; it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath , the first meeting of the X-Club , and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’. (shrink)

‘Our’ included not only Hooker and Huxley but their fellow-members of the X-Club. ‘Our time’ had been the 1870s and early 1880s. For a five-year period from November 1873 to November 1878 Hooker had been President of the Society, Huxley one of the Secretaries, and fellow X-Club member, William Spottiswoode, the Treasurer. Hooker was followed in the Presidency by Spottiswoode, and on Spottiswoode's death in 1883 Huxley was elected President. During this period other X-Club members—Edward Frankland, John Tyndall, George Busk, (...) Sir John Lubbock, and Thomas Hirst—were ordinary members of the Council of the Society. As the Table below (p. 60) shows, there were at least three members of the X-Club on the Council of the Royal Society from November 1870 until November 1882. On eight occasions in this period there were four or more X-Club members on the Council. ‘Our time’ came to an end in 1885 when ill-health forced Huxley's retirement after only two years in the Presidency, and G. G. Stokes at last became President. (shrink)

My goals in this paper are twofold: to outline the refashioning of amateur and professional roles in life science in late Victorian Yorkshire, and to provide a revised historiography of the relationship between amateurs and professionals in this era. Some historical treatments of this relationship assume that amateurs were demoralized by the advances of laboratory science, and so ceased to contribute and were left behind by the autonomous "new biology." Despite this view, I show that many amateurs played a vital (...) part in the construction of a professional academic community in urban Yorkshire, and then continued to collaborate with the laboratory-based biologists. The key to any analysis of the relationship between amateurs and professionals is the great variety of amateur identities and practices in Victorian Yorkshire. The amateur-professional rift fallacy arose because laboratory biologists fashioned an identity in conscious opposition to a particular type of amateur: an ideal that belied an array of cooperative relationships. As naturalists refashioned their roles and identities in light of the changes within academe and without, debates about the practice and place of life science took place as often among amateurs as between professionals and amateurs. (shrink)