more than a century ago three eminent galileo scholars, raffaello caverni, antonio favaro, and emil wohlwill, discussed the emergence of galileo's science of motion and the documentary evidence pertaining to it. among the works of these scholars, only favaro's edizione nazionale of galileo's works is still widely used, while the contents of their other writings only play a minor if any role in the current english-speaking literature. the disappearance from historical memory of many of the substantial contributions by these authors is closely associated with a narrowing of the perspective under which galileo's science and its context have been discussed in more recent scholarship.

i propose a revisionist account of the production and reception of galileo's telescopic observations of 1609–10, an account that focuses on the relationship between credit and disclosure. galileo, i argue, acted as though the corroboration of his observations were easy, not difficult. his primary worry was not that some people might reject his claims, but rather that those able to replicate them could too easily proceed to make further discoveries on their own and deprive him of credit. consequently, he tried to slow down potential replicators to prevent them from becoming competitors. he did so by not providing other practitioners access to high-power telescopes and by withholding information about how to build them. this essay looks at the development of galileo's monopoly on early telescopic astronomy to understand how the relationship between disclosure and credit changed as he moved from being an instrument-maker to becoming a discoverer and, eventually, a court philosopher.

Recent studies in nineteenth-century spiritualism have illuminated the social practice of the occult in various cultural contexts. Richard Noakes in his latest study on telegraphy and the occult in Victorian England, for instance, shows how the world of spiritualism and the world of technology were welded together by Victorian engineering schemes and money.R. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an occult art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the diffusion of electricity to the other world’, BJHS (1999), 32, 421–59. This paper looks at another culture of occult practice which has often been neglected by historians of science: the role of spiritism in the making of German experimental psychology. Based on a debate focusing on the German astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zöllner and the American medium Henry Slade, I will show how spiritistic experiments were situated in the emerging contexts of scientific practice, laboratories and disciplines.For a more external approach on Zöllner see C. Meinel, Karl Friedrich Zöllner und die Wissenschaftskultur der Gründerzeit, Berlin, 1991. ‘Spiritismus’ in German and ‘spiritualism’ in English refer to the study of ghosts. ‘Spiritualismus’ in German refers to the metaphysical and theological dimension of the spiritual. This study will also take a close look at the perception of spiritistic mediums as instruments by experimenters such as Zöllner.This perception dates back to the 18th century. S. Schaffer, ‘Deus et Machina’, La Lettre de la Maison française (1997), 9, 30–58. On the perception of experimental subjects as machines in Victorian culture see A. Winter, Mesmerized, Chicago, 1998, Chapter 3.

Things were in control and then they were not and then they were.

Sally Bushell, Under the Breadfruit TreeS. Bushell, Under the Breadfruit Tree, Cambridge, 1997, 22.

At the centre of nineteenth-century imperial authority sat the British Museum, which set the standard for discourse about natural history. This paper examines the meaning of those standards, exploring their important but little-understood role in ending the nineteenth-century species debate. The post-Reform Bill political assault on the authority of the British Museum is examined in the light of the ‘species problem’, and a surprising solution by John Edward Gray, keeper of the natural history collection, is seen as both a mediation and a closure of disputes over the meaning of species and the competence of naturalists. Gray's strategic solution – revealed in his copious notes on the parliamentary commissions investigating the affairs of the BM – embodied competence in institutional discourse and set the stage for the supposed ‘cynical’ definition of species later adopted in Darwin's Origin of Species, namely that species are merely what competent naturalists say they are.

This essay examines Jane Marcet's 1806 Conversations on Chemistry in the context of a newly emerging ideology of science. As part of this emergence, a new public for chemistry had to be formed and clearly demarcated from that of ‘public men’ of science. Although this essay examines Marcet's relation to Humphry Davy's public lectures on chemistry, it focuses on the encouragement she received from the highly intellectual Geneva elite, to whom she was related. Comparing her work to the influential Bibliothèque britannique founded by members of this elite, it asks why a group of patrician intellectuals would want to cultivate women's interest in chemistry and encourage the popularization of science in the aftermath of a revolution which threatened their national identity and power. It suggests that the answer may lie in the recourse to science to establish moral and political authority in the aftermath of this very revolution.