Since the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny.

This study presents the first translation from Latin to English of the Linnaean dissertation Mundus invisibilis or The Invisible World, submitted by Johannes Roos in 1769. The dissertation highlights Linnaeus's conviction that infectious diseases could be transmitted by living organisms, too small to be seen. Biographies of Linnaeus often fail to mention that Linnaeus was correct in ascribing the cause of diseases such as measles, smallpox and syphilis to living organisms. The dissertation itself reviews the work of many microscopists, especially on zoophytes and insects, marvelling at the many unexpected discoveries. It then discusses and quotes at length the observations of Münchhausen suggesting that spores from fungi causing plant diseases germinate to produce animalcules, an observation that Linnaeus claimed to have confirmed. The dissertation then draws parallels between these findings and the contagiousness of many human diseases, and urges further studies of this ‘invisible world’ since, as Roos avers, microscopic organisms may cause more destruction than occurs in all wars.

This paper reconstructs Wronski's philosophical foundations of mathematics. It uses his critique of Lagrange's algebraic analysis as a vignette to introduce the problems that he raised, and argues that these problems have not been properly appreciated by his contemporaries and subsequent commentators. The paper goes on to reconstruct Wronski's mathematical law of creation and his notions of theory and techne, in order to put his objections to Lagrange in their philosophical context. Finally, Wronski's proof of his universal law (the expansion of a given function by any series of functions) is reviewed in terms of the above reconstruction. I argue that Wronski's philosophical approach poses an alternative to the views of his contemporary mainstream mathematicians, which brings up the contingency of their choices, and bridges the foundational concerns of early modernity with those of the twentieth-century foundations crisis. I also argue that Wronski's views may be useful to contemporary philosophy of mathematical practice, if they are read against their metaphysical grain.