The cultural history of museums is crucial to the understanding of nineteenth-century natural history and its place in wider society, and yet although many of the larger metropolitan institutions are well charted, there remains very little accessible work on the hundreds of English collections outside London and the ancient universities. Natural history museums have been studied as part of the imperial project and as instruments of national governments; this paper presents an intermediary level of control, examining the various individuals and institutions who owned and managed museums at a local level in provincial England, and their intended audience constituencies. The shifting forms and functions of collections in Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester are studied in the hands of private collectors, learned societies, municipal authorities and civic colleges. I argue that the civic elite retained control of museums throughout the nineteenth century, and although the admission criteria of these various groups became ostensibly more inclusive, privileged access continued to be granted to expert and esteemed visitors.

Huxley's invention of the term ‘agnostic’ in 1869 is often seen as a brilliant rhetorical strategy. Portrayed as an effective weapon in Huxley's public debates with defenders of the Anglican establishment, the creation of scientific agnosticism has been interpreted as a turning point in the relationship between science and religion. In this paper I will challenge this interpretation of the rise of scientific agnosticism. Huxley was reluctant to identify himself unambiguously as an agnostic in public until 1883 and his restricted use of agnostic concepts during the 1870s and 1880s was compromised when other unbelievers, with different agendas, sought to capitalize on the polemical advantages of referring to themselves as agnostics. As a result, he was not always associated with agnosticism in the public mind and his original conception of it was modified by others to the point where he felt compelled to intervene in 1889 to set the record straight. But Huxley could not control the public meaning of ‘agnosticism’ and its value to him as a rhetorical strategy was severely limited.

The object of sampling surveys is to evaluate variables characterizing an aggregate (the “whole”) through the observation of only a fraction of that whole, the “sample.” Though these surveys do focus on sociological or economic variables, it is because of opinion polls – often referred to as Gallup polls, from the name of the American businessman who first applied them to election forecasts and market surveys – that the investigative techniques involved in sampling surveys gained their claim to fame. The identification with this particular type of survey has become so strong that the French word for sampling survey, sondage, which, for statisticians, designates that survey method which substitutes the “part” for the “whole” (sampling) has become, for the general public, synonymous with the term enquête d’opinion (poll), to such an extent that any controversy on sondages now focuses on the scientific validity of the concept of “opinion” rather than on the legitimacy of extrapolating “from the part to the whole.” This technique, however, now perfectly well codified thanks to probabilistic techniques and the computation of “confidence intervals” has a complex history, which predates the Gallup method of the 1930s. The probabilistic justification of the method’s legitimacy stems from a number of developments in different survey techniques, focusing on “typical cases,” “examples,” and, subsequently, on “purposive” sampling techniques, as opposed to “random” sampling. This legitimization, relying on probabilities, has not, however, gained general acceptance, since even nowadays, the so-called “quota” method does not follow the canons of random selection and of confidence intervals.

Argument

How did statistical representativeness first appear in the United States? To answer this question we turn to the archives of the Department of Agriculture. Since the 1860s, agricultural statisticians have been working to come up with representative groups of farmers able to answer questions about crop production. The archives describe the methods and tools used to devise representative samples. But the explicit justifications of why a given sample is particularly representative are nearly always missing. Where can we find explanations for why one sampling method is representative and not another? Where can we find the why when we have only the how? This paper argues that we can turn to the theorists of democracy for answers, because selecting a sample and selecting a group of representatives have a lot in common.

Argument

Norwegian statisticians were pioneers in the development of sampling techniques for social and economic investigations in the late nineteenth century. After a few years of extensive use of sampling surveys in large-scale social and economic investigations, the method fell out of use in the early 1900s. This article supports Alain Desrosières’ argument that the emergence of sampling procedures in social investigations must be seen in relation to a modern “individualistic” view of society. But the importance of the institutional setting is also stressed: The way statistical research was connected to the power and resources of the State within the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) was a central element in the development and implementation of the new technique. A separate argument is presented to explain why the method suddenly lost ground in Norway and the general director of the CBS stopped promoting his method in the meetings of the International Statistical Institute. The explanation is probably to be found in a large and politically important survey in the 1890s that was attacked by a group of actuaries from private insurance firms. The heated and long-lasting debate turned into a question about trust in the new method and the reputation of the head of CBS as a statistical expert. The necessary trust and confidence was lost when the CBS in 1906 had to admit that important estimates from this survey obviously were erroneous.

Preliminary Note on Terminology: In Jesuit-related documents, the Latin term Nostri [“Ours”] is used to refer to Jesuits, to avoid unnecessarily using a word derived from the name of Jesus. The translations that follow retain the use of “Ours” in English following the Latin. The reader should remember that this term refers to members of the Society of Jesus. Also in the documents of Clavius (Historical Documents, Part II), the term scholastics is used, which refers to young Jesuit seminarians who have pronounced their initial vows as Jesuits but have not yet completed their studies and have not yet been ordained as Catholic priests. Similarly, the term philosophers refers to Jesuit seminarians who have finished studying humanities, are currently studying philosophy, and have not yet started their study of theology.