The relations between different areas of knowledge have been a subject of interest to philosophers as well as to scientists and mathematicians from antiquity. While recent work in this direction has been largely concerned with the question whether one branch of knowledge (such as arithmetic) can be reduced to another (such as logic), the questions which exercised the Greek philosophers on these matters have a different starting point. Taking for granted that there are a number of distinct areas of knowledge, they proceeded to consider a variety of relations which they observed to hold among the sciences as they knew them; the question of the priority of one science to another is a recurrent theme. In fact, three sorts of orderings were noticed, and the associated conceptions of priority are interesting. Only one of them is the concern of the present paper, though, and I shall briefly describe the remaining two only for purposes of contrast.

Although there are numerous and significant differences between the theories of scientific growth and change proposed by Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan, they all hold that specific scientific theories should be viewed as constitutive of more comprehensive theories. Kuhn calls those more general theories ‘paradigms’, Lakatos labels them ‘research programmes’ and Laudan refers to them as ‘research traditions’. They all argue that scientists are much more willing to give up the specific theory within a given research programme rather than the programme itself, and that individual theories should be viewed as attempts to increase the overall explanatory power of the more general theories, since the ultimate concern of the scientist is with the success of the general rather than the specific theory. When a basic theory or research programme is confronted with severe criticism, proponents attempt to protect the hard core or central elements of their programme through the invention of auxiliary hypotheses. Good auxiliary hypotheses adequately answer the objections for which they are designed, and suggest new avenues of research. In 1928, Arthur Holmes provided proponents of continental drift theory with an auxiliary hypothesis which afforded them a badly needed account of the forces responsible for continental drift. Although Holmes' proposal was not ultimately correct, it was the first plausible alternative offered by an exponent of the continental drift research programme.

My assignment today, as I understand it, is to say something about the Second International Congress of the History of Science, the only previous one held in the United Kingdom; to mention some of the great historians of science which these islands have produced; and to direct our thoughts for a few moments to the historiography of science, technology and medicine, namely the guiding ideas in the light of which one should attempt to write it. So much has already been said in thanks to the city and the university in which we are now assembled that I could hardly add to it, except to express my personal sense of elation at coming on this occasion to the ‘Athens of the North’ where so many distinguished men have lived in the past, from mediaeval times onwards.

Manuscript Add. 3965, section 13, folios 541r–542r and 545r–546r is in the Portsmouth Collection of manuscripts and housed in the University Library, Cambridge. These drafts contain a careful account, in Newton's hand, of his views on place, time, and God. They are part of a large number of drafts relating to the three official editions of the Principia published in Newton's lifetime.

The reception of Euclid's Optica in the West has received scant attention, in contrast with the interest evoked by the Latin tradition of the Elements. A study of the extremely complex manuscript tradition of the Optica reveals that the translations of this work too were soon in the hands of many teachers, eager to learn what the great Geometer taught concerning vison and visual perspective. Three translations—two from the Arabic (Liber de radiis visualibus and Liber de aspectibus) and one from the Greek (Liber de visu)—were available to scholars before the close of the twelfth century. Furthermore, the Greco-Latin Liber de visu, by far the most widely known and carefully studied of the translations, appeared in at least three different versions before 1200. One of these versions is of particular interest as providing evidence of the diffusion of texts among the scholarly community in the latter part of the twelfth century. The version in question has survived in two manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi College 283, folios 163r–165v, and Seville, Bibl. Columbina 7.6.2, folios 43(44)v–54(55)r. Although the various translations and many other versions of Liber de visu are anonymous, the authors of this text are explicitly given in the colophon, which reads: Nota quod sexaginta et tria toreumata continentur in is to libra. Aimare, gralias age quia hoc opus sic glosulasti sub magistro Johanne de Beaumont. Explicit feliciter liber de visu. Whether Aimar was merely the scribe or perhaps the student of John of Beaumont, it is undoubtedly the latter that is to be primarily credited with the contents of the treatise. Unfortunately, neither The complete peerage nor the Dictionary of national biography list a John of Beaumont from the twelfth century, although the Beaumont family, with some reputation for learning, was prominent at that time in Normandy and England, particularly in the regions near Oxford. Whether John was a member of that illustrious line remains merely a matter for speculation. In any case, the treatise remains of interest to Euclidian scholars and historians of optics as a good witness to the twelfth century concern, not only with Euclid's visual theory, but particularly with his attempts to employ geometry in solving the problems of visual perspective.