Notes and Records the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Royal Society (GB) |
| ISSN | 0035-9149 / 1743-0178 |
| Scopus | 23005 |
| OpenAlex | S59378048 |
| MAG | 59378048 |
| Website | http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ |
| Total publications | 1.727 |
| Coverage period | 1938 - 2025 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 124 |
| Impact factor | 0.166 |
| SJR | 0.166 (Q3) |
| SNIP | 0.771 |
| CiteScore | 1.5 |
| h-index | 4 |
| i10-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 33.3% |
This journal focuses on the history of science, making it directly relevant to Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS is a closely cognate field that frequently publishes work read by social anthropologists
History and Philosophy of Science · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Evolution and Science Education · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science
Vegetal agency: The sap controversy in early eighteenth-century France treatises on plants and gardening
This article examines how the apologetics of the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) impacted his presentation of botanical knowledge in the ten dialogues published in the first and second volumes of his natural history book Le Spectacle de la nature (1732–1750). Pluche popularized a conception of the physical world where plants are reducible to inert mechanisms, devoid of life and agency. First, I examine the various intertwinements of science …
Creating life in the laboratory: Francis Bacon's journey from living spirits to animate bodies
This article aims to reconstruct a complex inquiry into the nature of life delineated in Francis Bacon's ‘last writings’, a series of manuscripts discovered at the end of the twentieth century. I show that these fragmentary texts can be understood if we place them in the larger context of Bacon's posthumous works: the Sylva Sylvarum and the Historia densi et rari . Taken together, these texts unveil Bacon's last bold project of a History and inqu…
Plants and laboratories: The ascent of sap between physics and vegetal physiology
The ascent of sap in plants represented a puzzle in early modern studies of nature. Although philosophers, gardeners and naturalists had traditionally explained it as a process of fermentation caused by the Sun, an alternative view emerged in combination with the physical studies of pressure. This latter field of experimentation somehow influenced the study of plants. While the mathematical study of liquids gained momentum, scholars started to ap…
Harvesting Underground: (Re)generative theories and vegetal analogies in the early modern debate on mineral ores (I)
The early modern use of vegetal terms to explain the origin and growth of ores was widespread in mining industry, alchemy, and natural philosophy. In the writings of authors from many different backgrounds, mineral veins were often described as ‘trees’ which moved upwards, bore fruits, and underwent a life cycle. Accordingly, the existence in ores of ‘seeds’ (and, therefore, of a (re)generative power) was frequently invoked to explain the apparen…
Plant alchemy, Paracelsianism and internal signature theory in the writings of Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641)
In France, the Jardin des Plantes is one of the oldest surviving scientific institutions, the chief botanical garden and the host of many schools and centres studying the natural sciences. It was established in 1640 as the Royal Garden through the tireless labour of the physician Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641). The present article focuses on La Brosse's views of advancement of plant alchemy as the source of knowledge of plants. It discusses his ado…
Green Laboratories: Plant studies in the early modern period
By the 1550s, the Dukes Medici constructed small laboratories or fonderie in Florence. These were buildings with furnaces and stills to perform chymical experiments, preparing distillations and fabricating pharmaceutical therapies. The fame and prestige of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s (1519-1574) pharmaceutical laboratory has been well-recognized by scholars
Isaac Newton’s pint flagon: Beer, veneration, and the history of science
The first part of this article is the biography of a drinking vessel. The authors examine evidence that a wooden flagon that Newton is on record as giving to his Trinity College, Cambridge chamber-fellow John Wickins survives intact to the present day. This evidence includes Newton’s friendship with Wickins, a re-creation of six generations of the latter’s family, moments in the nineteenth century when the relic came into public view, and its beq…
Visual immersion: Daniele Barbaro's fish album and the wave of interest in aquatic creatures in mid sixteenth-century Europe
The mid sixteenth century wave of encyclopaedic publications about fish and other water creatures introduced massive numbers of newly made naturalia images. This article concentrates on the phase of image making and collecting that came before print. The focus is on the lost album with fish drawings created before 1551 by the Venetian humanist Daniele Barbaro and his personal painter Maestro Plinio. Naturalists such as Belon, Salviani and Aldrova…
R. A. Fisher on J. A. Cobb's The problem of the sex-ratio
The logic of the rarer-sex effect, concerning how natural selection acts to balance the sex ratio among newborns, was long supposed to have originated with Ronald Aylmer Fisher in his 1930 book The genetical theory of natural selection . However, the principle is now understood to have originated with John Austin Cobb in his 1914 paper ‘The problem of the sex-ratio’. Fisher did not provide a citation of Cobb's sex-ratio paper, and it has been unc…
Mendel's closet: Genetics, eugenics and the exceptions of sex in Edwardian Britain
This article situates formative Mendelian and chromosomal precepts and rhetoric as an integral part of ‘reproductive’ physiology and the broader sexological terrain in Edwardian Britain. Alongside the discovery of ‘internal secretions’ (hormones), the discovery of the sex chromosomes, made around the same time as the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity at the turn of the twentieth century, transformed the ways in which questions about sex de…
Drawing muscles with diagrams: How a novel dissection cut inspired Nicolaus Steno's mathematical myology (1667)
In 1667, twenty years before Isaac Newton published his mathematization of physics, and more than ten years before the publication of Giovanni Borelli's De motu animalium , the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno published an entirely new geometrical theory of muscle motion in the book Elementorum myologiæ specimen . Historians of science have studied this book in recent decades, but the recent rediscovery of a seventeenth-century muscle atlas at the…
The visualization of unknown animals. Aesthetics of natural history in Perrault's Description anatomique , Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium and Réaumur's History of insects
The visualization of animals in order to categorize their position in the great chain of being was one of the primary interests of natural history in early modern times. According to contemporary opinion, the greatest challenge lay in the precise depiction of animals unknown and those not visible to the naked eye. The focus here will be on a graphic from Claude Perrault's Description anatomique of 1669, the plates and writings of Maria Sibylla Me…
Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar Lecture Remaking Ourselves: Technologies of Flesh and the Futures of Selfhood
Our biotechnologies have entered uncharted territory. The facility for precision editing of the human genome raises the prospect of systematic, ‘post-Darwinian’ control of inheritance. Stem cells can be used to make embryo-like structures that were never fertilized eggs and which might or might not recapitulate normal embryonic development. Neural ‘organoids’ grown in a dish force us to ask what are the minimal substrates of consciousness. It is …
Minakata Kumagusu in London: Challenging Eurocentrism in the pages of Nature
The Japanese biologist and ethnologist Minakata Kumagusu has achieved a degree of celebrity in Japan for being the first Asian contributor to the British scientific magazine Nature . However, although Minakata's many contributions to Nature from 1893 to 1914 provided British readers with rare insight into Asian scientific achievements, he is seldom discussed in history of science scholarship produced by American, British and European researchers.…
Nineteenth-century Japanese and British science in context: An introduction to transnational-comparative studies
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…
Classification, Observational Practice, and Henry Seebohm’s The Birds of the Japanese Empire in Late-Victorian Britain
In the latter months of 1890 the ornithologist Henry Seebohm (1832–1895) published his transnationally well-received The birds of the Japanese Empire . However, although travelling widely to places such as Greece, South Africa and Siberia, Seebohm never visited Japan. Instead, his knowledge of Japanese birds was gathered through second-hand methods including knowledge and network building, specimen acquiring and comparing and the adoption of a no…
The impact of British chemistry and physics upon Japanese science in the late nineteenth century: The Williamson–Sakurai connection at University College London
The Meiji period between 1868 and 1912, when the introduction of Western science into Japan started in earnest, was also the time when specialization became an increasingly pressing and complex issue in natural science, especially in Victorian Britain where specialization went hand in hand with ‘interconnectedness’ between various fields of study. This article examines the impact of this complicated situation surrounding ‘specialization’ in ninet…
Anthropological Glimpses of Japan in Nineteenth-Century Britain
This article explores two early anthropological works on Japan that were produced in Britain during the nineteenth century. The first is James Cowles Prichard's chapter on Japanese culture from the third edition of his Researches into the physical history of mankind (1844) . It represents the first formative study by a leading ethnologist to tackle the subject. The second is Edward Burnett Tylor's essay on Japanese belief for the Journal for the …
Originality conundrum: British education of engineers in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)
Britain played a vital role in the early years of Meiji Japan (1868–1912), when the country was undergoing rapid transformation as it adopted Western technologies like railroads and the telegraph. The British influence extended beyond simply transferring technical skills, however. Young, idealistic British instructors wanted to help cultivate in their Japanese students the spirit of an engineer—an independent and creative mindset that could chang…
A Japanese Christian physicist defends evolution: Kimura Shunkichi's appropriation of British discourses in his philosophical scrutiny of science
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 1…
The campfire stories of Russell Marker, a pioneer of chemistry
The maverick American chemist Russell Earl Marker (1902–1995) is known for his studies on the fragmentation of organic mercury compounds, establishing the concept of the octane number, investigating the rearrangements of hydrocarbons and exploring the relationship between optical rotation and the configuration of organic compounds. His greatest achievement, however, is the elaboration of seminal isolation and synthetic methods of an important cla…
Wilder Penfield dreams of the Nobel Prize
This essay investigates the relationship the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield had, in old age, with honours and accolades, including the Nobel Prize. Documents from the Nobel Prize Archives shed light on his nominations and on the assessments the Committee took into consideration, illuminating the professional networks the nomination process activated and the values underwriting the adjudication process. Meanwhile, Penfield's correspondence …
Performing excellence: Nobel Prize nomination networks in North America
This paper examines how scientific excellence is performed in Nobel nominations for medical scientists. Performing excellence encompasses both conducting excellent scientific work and being recognized for it. Both dimensions are closely intertwined: doing and recognizing excellent work depend on each other. Tracing nominations from the Nobel Archives in Solna, Sweden, the paper shows that Nobel Prizes are only the tip of the iceberg of networks o…
Friendship archaeology: How Maude Abbott occupied overlapping spaces of excellence
This paper is drawn from a chapter of a forthcoming book on Canadian physician Maude Abbott. The excerpt explores how a prominent woman negotiated relationships during the early twentieth century. Abbott spent most of her career at McGill University in Montreal, as curator of its medical museum and as a researcher in congenital heart disease. Nonetheless her network of correspondents was vast. Engaging an approach the author calls ‘friendship arc…
Eloge to James (Jim) Arthur Bennett 2 April 1947 — 28 October 2023
Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’
Newtonian scholars have long been aware of a set of draft Scholia to Propositions IV to IX of Book III of the Principia (2). These were composed in the 1690’s, as part of an unimplemented plan for a second edition of the work. Since they describe supposed anticipations of Newton’s doctrines in the thought of Graeco-Roman antiquity, they have become known as the ‘classical’ Scholia (3). The analogies and parallels drawn in them are so strained, as…
Early problems in professionalizing scientific research: Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) and the Royal Society, with an unpublished letter to Henry Oldenburg
Nehemiah Grew’s The Anatomy of Plants (1682) was one of the most important botanical books published in the seventeenth century. In this compendium of his research, Grew combined an unprecedentedly detailed study of the structure of plants with an attempt to understand their functions. Working independently of, but in parallel with, his Italian contemporary, Marcello Malpighi, Grew justifiably saw himself as a pioneer in a new field, and between …
Journals, learned societies and money: Philosophical Transactions , ca . 1750–1900
This paper investigates the finances of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions, showing that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries journal publishing was a drain on funds rather than a source of income. Even without any expectation of profit, the costs of producing Transactions nevertheless had to be covered, and the way in which this was done reflected the changing financial situation of the Society. An examination of the…
Acoustics in the early Royal Society 1660-1680
The early Royal Society has been the focus of much attention by historians of science over many years, (1) but strangely enough there is no really detailed account to be found of the activities and discussions which took place in the weekly meetings, although there is ample information available on the subject. This study of the Royal Society’s collective interest in acoustics aims to provide a detailed analysis of an important subject that has n…
The time revolution of 1859 and the stratification of the primeval mind
Archaeologists regard the demonstration of human antiquity in 1859 as a major breakthrough in the development of prehistoric studies. However, the significance of this event, although acknowledged by other disciplines, is largely passed over. We investigate why this is so by examining the procedures that the antiquary John Evans and the geologist Joseph Prestwich used to make their argument. We present previously unreported documents from the Roy…
The unmaking of an anthropologist: Wallace returns from the field, 1862–70
This essay follows Alfred Russel Wallace back from the field in 1862, tracing how his views on human evolution developed after his field experiences in the East Indies and how he articulated them within the social structure of British science during the 1860s. It analyses his involvement in the metropolitan scientific institutions dedicated to the study of man, the Ethnological Society of London and its breakaway counterpart, the Anthropological …
The first ascent of Mont Blanc
When Mount Everest was finally conquered by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkey on 29 May 1953 the event aroused enormous interest, and all the resources of ancient and modern methods of communication by runner, telegraph, and wireless were available to spread the news rapidly all over the world. It arrived in Great Britain three days later, during the night of 1/2 June and one of its first recipients was the Queen. Conditions were very different w…
An interrupted story: French translations from Philosophical Transactions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Although consistently recognized as desirable by both the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences, translations of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were only infrequently undertaken officially. More successful were some private attempts, which by the end of the eighteenth century had produced a virtually complete translation, albeit only of Lowthorp's abridgements
Mentors, the marquise Du Châtelet and historical memory
When writing a biography, much has to be omitted to keep the life story focused and manageable for the reader. In La Dame d'Esprit: a biography of the marquise Du Châtelet the information about Émilie Du Châtelet's mentors seems, in retrospect, all too brief. This article therefore presents Maupertuis, Clairaut and Dortous de Mairan and describes their interactions with the marquise. It ends with speculations about why this exceptional philosophe…
Ladies in the Scientific Revolution
Two exhibitions were recently held in the Library of the Society, one on Women in Science and another on the Archives of the Scientific Revolution. The first did not go so far back as the scientific revolution, with one exception, the translation of Newton's Principia by the Marquise du Chàtelet. Yet it was in the scientific revolution, conveniently taken as running from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, that …
The Royal Society and Italy 1667-1795
Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves…
Analysis and demonstration: Wallis and Newton on mathematical presentation
Emulating the Greek geometers, Newton used synthetic demonstration to present the ground-breaking arguments of the Principia . This paper argues that we can better understand Newton's reasons for using geometry by considering John Wallis's interpretation of synthetic demonstration. Wallis condemned demonstration for failing to explain the mathematical truths it presented. He opposed to it a presentation that combined symbolic analysis with a docu…
Proving instruments credible in the early nineteenth century: The British Magnetic Survey and site-specific experimentation
For several decades now, many histories of science have sought to emphasize the important role of instruments and other material objects in the operation of science. Many, too, have been attentive to ideas of space and place and the different geographies which are visible in the historical practice of science. This paper draws on both traditions in its interpretation of a heretofore neglected aspect of Britain's nineteenth-century geomagnetic sto…
What do you mean by a periodical? Forms and functions
The word ‘periodical’ immediately calls to mind huge stacks of bound volumes neatly arranged on library shelves. Yet, in historical terms, it would be hard to claim that ‘periodical’ is a word endowed with a definite and univocal connotation. Even the criterion of ‘periodicity’ leaves a lot out of account. Forms historically assumed by periodicals often envisaged regular schedules of appearance, but this was often more of a wish than a reality. T…
John Lubbock, caves, and the development of Middle and Upper Palaeolithic archaeology
John Lubbock's Pre-Historic Times (1865) was the first publication to use the terms ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’ to define major periods of early prehistory. Because of this he has come to be seen as one of the most influential figures in the history of prehistoric archaeology. We examine this image here, in terms of his influence on contemporaries both in Britain and in France, where early excavations were providing materials that came to form…
Faithful interpreters? Translation theory and practice at the early Royal Society
The early Fellows of the Royal Society received letters, papers and printed books written in several European vernaculars. In many cases a translation was needed to make these texts accessible. Translators, though, had to negotiate the Society's corporate views on language and prose style, and also prevailing contemporary theories of literary translation set out by popular poets such as John Dryden and Abraham Cowley. This article examines the tr…
John Lubbock, science, and the liberal intellectual
John Lubbock's longest-standing scientific research interest was entomology. Some of his earliest systematic investigations of insect and marine life began under the tutelage of Darwin. Darwin shaped the trajectory of, and the programme for, Lubbock's natural history work. However, to understand John Lubbock's identity as a scientist, he must be located within the context of the Victorian 'intellectual'. This paper traces Lubbock's entomological …
Uncovering the Arundel Library at the Royal Society: Changing meanings of science and the fate of the Norfolk donation
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was the most important collector in early 17th Century Britain. Much attention has been paid to his collections of painting and sculpture, his patronage of painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck and architects such as Inigo Jones, and his search through Greece and Turkey for antiquities. Little, however, has been written on the Arundel Library, which was equally famous. The cause is not hard to find: the library has …
Du Chaillu’s stuffed gorillas and the savants from the British Museum
It was 1861, a high point in the exploration of Africa. Livingstone had recently returned famous from the exploration of the Zambesi River and the discovery of the Victoria Falls; Burton and Speke had reached Lake Tanganyika; a new expedition supported by the Royal Geographical Society and led by Speke was being organized to determine the source of the Nile and its position relative to the Great Lakes; the origin of the Niger was being sought. Ex…
The Commonplace Book of Edmond Halley
HALLEY’S personal and professional papers have survived in reasonable numbers, but little attention has been accorded to his Commonplace Book. Indeed, for more than two centuries the existence of the work remained unknown to scholarship. In 1898, in a footnote to the sketch of Halley in his edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Andrew Clark reported: ‘In the Earl of Macclesfield’s library at Shirburne Castle, Oxon., are several MSS. by Halley; among t…
Sir William Jones, Sir Joseph Banks, and the Royal Society
NOW that the correspondence of Sir William Jones, F. R. S. (1746-1794), is available and the information there can be integrated with the data long available in his published works (1), scholars can appreciate the extensiveness and importance of his association with Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820). The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to study Jones’s association with that gifted President of the Royal Society, as well as Jones’s botanical …
Follow the data: Administering science at Edward Sabine's magnetic department, Woolwich, 1841–57
This paper considers the transmission of magnetic observations from overseas, colonial, observatories and the removal of these data from manuscripts to become the printed results of the so-called magnetic crusade, between 1841 and 1857. The processes adopted by Edward Sabine's magnetic department at Woolwich Arsenal to cope with the accumulation of very literal masses of data are considered, as well as the politicking that attended Sabine's attem…
Attending to insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray
Francis Willughby and John Ray were at the forefront of the natural history of insects in the second half of the seventeenth century. Willughby in particular had a deep interest in insects' metamorphosis, behaviour and diversity, an interest that he passed on to his friend and mentor Ray. By examining Willughby's contributions to John Wilkins's Essay towards a Real Character (1668) and Ray's Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (171…
John Wallis as editor of Newton's mathematical work
This paper explores Wallis's role as editor of Newton's mathematical work. My objective is to understand how two mathematicians who held different views concerning mathematical method could nonetheless cooperate with one another quite effectively. Most notably, Wallis and Newton pursued different policies as far as the printing of algebra is concerned. In the 1690s Newton held the view that algebra is a heuristic method ‘not worthy of publication…
De Moivre's knowledge community: An analysis of the subscription list to the Miscellanea Analytica
In 1730 Abraham De Moivre published Miscellanea Analytica, a book containing research results in several areas of mathematics, but especially in probability theory. Subscribers to the book have been identified from the subscription list and personal information about these individuals has been collected and stored in a database. Once data collection was completed, the data were retrieved, graphed and analysed to look for connections between the s…
Gleanings from the library - I
That Birch’s ‘History of the Royal Society' (4 vols., 1756-7) is essentially a copy of the original minutes of the Council and Ordinary Meetings of the Society during the first twenty-five years of its existence is generally know n; but it is not so well known that the originals are occasionally incomplete and not infrequently inaccurate, there being no minutes of several Annual General Meetings and no record at all of some Ordinary Meetings. Hoo…
The landed property of the Royal Society
Many institutions have found it advantageous to invest a proportion of their capital in land and buildings, but not many scientific societies follow this practice, some finding trust funds more convenient, others considering that the supervision which landed property requires outweighs its other advantages. The Royal Society, however, has from time to time acquired by purchase or accepted by gift or bequest such property, and on the whole it has …
The first life table
To two Fellows of the Society, John Graunt (elected 1663) and Edmond Halley (elected 1678), the world owes the invention of that powerful vital-statistical instrument, the life table or table of mortality, but the respective shares of these men in the discovery is a matter of dispute. In the first edition of Graunt’s famous ‘Natural and Political Observations mentioned in a following Index and made upon the Bills of Mortality' (p. 84 of fifth edi…
The Anniversary Dinner
A custom which is as old as the Society itself, and which has been observed fairly regularly for 275 years, merits some consideration as being of more than ordinary interest in the history of the Society. The small group of men who, as early as 1645, used to meet as often as they could at a tavern to dine together and to discuss the new philosophy were the pioneers of the movement which led to the foundation of the Royal Society eighteen years la…
Societas Scientiarum Fennica
An important event of the present year has been the attainment of its centenary by the Societas Scientiarum Fennica, the Finnish equivalent of the Royal Society or the Académie des Sciences—though indeed of wider scope than these, including as it does a Humanistic section in addition to those concerned with Mathematics and Physical Sciences on the one hand and Natural History on the other. The Society, during the century of its existence, has bee…
The International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences at Copenhagen, August 1938
The International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences took place at Copenhagen in the first week of August. In accordance with the practice of this series of congresses the presidents of sections were Danish scientific men, and the President of the whole Congress was the veteran Professor Thomas Thomsen, its Honorary Secretary being Dr Kaj Birket-Smith in collaboration with Professor J. L. Myres. Doctors Thomsen and Birket-Smith…
Society's notes
OBITUARY 1938 HONOURS NEW FELLOW NEW FOREIGN MEMBERS BEQUEST LECTURES DISCUSSION CELEBRATIONS INTERNATIONAL CONGRESSES FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY COUNCIL MATTERS CHRIST’S HOSPITAL PROFESSOR SIGMUND FREUD
The dedication of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania in honour of Benjamin Franklin
In response to an invitation from the President and Board of Managers of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, the Royal Society appointed the Foreign Secretary as their delegate to attend the Dedication Ceremonies on 19, 20 and 21 May. The delegate presented a congratulatory address, a facsimile of the Charter Book, and a copy of the certificate signed by the Earl of Macclesfield and eight Fellows in favour of the election, without the usual pay…
The Society's finances - Part I - 1662-1830
The material which is at our disposal to-day for compiling an account of the Society’s finances is unfortunately far from being as ample as could be wished. The reports of the Anniversary Meetings and the minutes of Council supply a certain amount of information, but the original account books which were available before the latter half of the nineteenth century apparently no longer exist, and many of the reports that were prepared by various com…
The Bermuda Oceanographical Committee
The Royal Society has recently accepted responsibility for the administration of a Government grant given for the execution of a programme of oceanographical work based on the Bermuda Biological Station. In so doing it has, for the first time in its history, become the owner of a research vessel, and it is thought that a brief account of the proposed investigations and of the events which led to the formation of the Bermuda Oceanographical Commit…
Two hundred years ago, 1739
The Journal Books and the Council Minutes of the Society as well as the manuscript records that are preserved in our Library contain a rich collection of material illustrating the opinions, ideals and achievements of the small body of men who in the seventeenth century were drawn together by a common desire to advance Natural Knowledge. With its aid we may follow the history of science through nearly three centuries which have passed since Charle…
John Wallis, D.D., F. R. S., 1616-1703
It is a pleasure to welcome a volume devoted to the life and work of one of the ‘Original Fellows' of the Society—one of those elected to the Fellowship on 20 May 1663 by the President and Council nominated in the Charter. Dr Scott modestly describes his work as aiming ‘at giving an account of the contributions of John Wallis to the development of mathematics during the latter half of the seventeenth century' and as making ‘an attempt to re-estab…
Kauser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft: Report to the Royal Society
The outstanding impression left from our visit is a memory of the extraordinary kindness of the hospitality which we received: in particular the officials of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft took the utmost pains to organize our visit so that we could utilize the time at our disposal as profitably as possible. Our greatest privilege was that of meeting our colleagues at Dahlem and seeing their remarkable group of institutes, which together, are co…
Gleanings from the library - II: The Board of Longitude and the Royal Society
Interest in the Board of Longitude of the eighteenth century and its intimate connexion with the Royal Society has been revived by Earl Baldwin’s presentation to the Society of a collection of manuscripts, printed documents and original letters relating to the joint deliberations of the Society and the Board. An Act of Parliament, which was passed in 1714 offering various rewards for a method of finding the longitude at sea and constituting the B…
The Society's first bequest
Dr John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, died in November 1672, at the age of fifty-eight, and in his will left the sum of £400 to the Society. This was a most welcome gift, for the arrears of subscriptions already amounted to £1800, and only one-fourth of the Fellows (57 out of a total membership of 212) were classed as 'good paymasters'; some were removed from the list of Fellows two years later for being several years in default. Dr Wilkins was one…
Age of election to the Royal Society
In 1925 Sir Arthur Schuster published in the Proceedings (vol. 107, p. 368) a very interesting study of the life statistics of Fellows of the Royal Society; he refers also to a paper on a similar subject communicated to the Society in 1892 by Lieut.-General R. Strachey. The Treasurer informs me that in the Council Minutes (p. 57) of 7 November 1878 there is a statement that the average age of election of the Fellows then alive was 40 9 years. Fro…
The Society's finances Part II—1831 - 1938
The first part of this account of the Society’s finances dealt with the period 1660 to 1830, during which the Society first gradually extricated itself from many difficulties due to the lack of funds, and then after the middle of the eighteenth century succeeded in building up a moderate reserve. Throughout that period the information which the Council gave to the Fellows about the financial position of the Society was meagre, no details of the a…
A pioneer in palaeolithic discovery
About the year 1840, the scientific world was startled by the claim of Boucher de Perthes that he had found Hint implex ments in the old terrace deposits of the River Somme in France. These discoveries, which caused a revolution in the prevailing views of man’s antiquity, had to meet strong opposition, but were eventually accepted. As early as 1797, however, John Frere, a Fellow of the Royal Society living at Roydon Hall, Norfolk, had published a…
Biological expeditions
I can call to mind many occasions on which grave apprehension has been expressed as to the proper use of scientific funds for biological expeditions to various parts of the world. An applicant for funds is often not clear as to the bearing of the results or collections which he may obtain on broad scientific problems, while he is inclined to select his venue for convenience rather than for its suitability or ripeness for investigation. He does no…
Libyan flowers
The present communication conforms precisely to the title of the publication which gives it hospitality. It is both a note—a sketch based on first-hand observation—and a record in that such a display is to be witnessed in Mareotis but few times in a century. The last of its sort dates back forty-one years according to the older desert inhabitants. I myself have been in touch with the district for ten years, and, during the last five, living in th…
The composition of the Fellowship and the Council of the Society
It is well known to most Fellows of the Society that for many years those who had little knowledge of science, or interest in its methods, were freely admitted to its ranks; but this has been less generally realized by some of those who have discussed the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article has been prepared to show what proportion of the Fellowship was composed of scientific men at various periods of the Society’s h…
The association of the Royal Sociey with progress in knowledge of oceanic tides
It is now well known that the tides of the ocean constitute a gravitational phenomenon in which the moon plays a large part, and that it was Newton’s Principia, published in 1687, which laid the foundations of all sound theoretical work upon the subject. But before the appearance of the Principia and in the very early years of the Society, Wallis, Flamsteed and Halley, as well as Sir R. Moray, S. Colepresse, H. Philips, S. Sturmy and J. Childrey,…
One hundred years ago. 1839
The century which had passed since the presidency of Sir Hans Sloane (1728-41) had seen many changes in the country, and not a few in the Society itself. The conditions which existed in 1739 and were described in the last number of Notes and Records differed very widely from those prevailing in the early part of the nineteenth century, and by comparing them we shall gain a clearer idea of the direction in which the Society and its activities were…
The officers of the Society (1662-1860)
A well-planned administration is indispensable for any new institution if it is to deal with its finances and membership, to record the communications received and to register correspondence with other bodies of like interests efficiently. With aims so wide in scope as the ‘Improvement of Natural Knowledge’ the amount of routine work was bound to be large even in the Society’s early days and to increase rapidly, but the provision of an adequate a…
The visit of Comenius to London in 1641-1642 and its bearing on the origins of the Royal Society
Miss Dorothy Stimson, Dean of Groucher College, U.S.A., in an article in Isis for 1 September 1935, tried to traverse the view stated in the Introduction to my Comenius in England (Oxford University Press (1932)), pp. 6-7, that the visit of Comenius (Komensky) to London in 1641-1642 marked an important stage in the development in England of the idea of a great society for scientific research which resulted in the organization of the informal ‘Inv…