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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 111 of 516

Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales
  • With an Introductory Compendium of the General Principles of that Science, and Comparative Views of the Structure of Foreign Countries
  • W. D. Conybeare, William Phillips
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    06 November 2014
  • In the early nineteenth century, the gifted stratigrapher and amateur geologist William Phillips (1773–1828) gave several lectures to interested young people in Tottenham on the subject of geology. These lectures were later collected into a book, which Phillips expanded in later versions. This reached its peak in 1822 when the clergyman William Daniel Conybeare (1787–1857) collaborated with Phillips to produce this rigorous and improved assessment of the geological composition of England and Wales. Although no second volume was ever published, the book had a tremendous impact on geologists throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, inspiring foreign scholars to produce equivalent volumes about their own countries. Conybeare's concern for the stratigraphy of fossils is especially remarkable for the time. William Fitton, later president of the Geological Society of London, praised the book highly, remarking that 'no equal portion of the earth's surface has ever been more ably illustrated'.

Hermann Lotze
  • An Intellectual Biography
  • William R. Woodward
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    09 June 2015
  • As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze (1817–81) defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception.

An Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat
  • John Leslie
  • Published online:
    05 June 2015
    Print publication:
    18 December 2014
    First published in:
    1804
  • The Scottish mathematician and natural philosopher Sir John Leslie (1766–1832) had set out at the end of the eighteenth century to explore the nature of heat radiation, which he felt was a 'dubious and neglected' area of physics. Leslie's inquiry, published in 1804, details his many experiments, notably the use of two self-devised instruments: Leslie's cube and his differential thermometer. Establishing several basic laws of heat radiation and rejuvenating the debate about the physical composition of heat, Leslie's work gained him the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1805. Nevertheless, the same publication jeopardised his chances of obtaining an academic position at Edinburgh. A single, allegedly atheistic endnote, supporting David Hume's views on causation, prompted protests by the local clergymen when his candidature for the chair of mathematics was under consideration. Leslie secured the professorship, however, and remained with the university until his death.

  • Phrenology, heredity and progress in George Combe's Constitution of Man

  • BILL JENKINS
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 48 / Issue 3 / September 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 May 2015, pp. 455-473
    Print publication:
    September 2015
    • Article
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  • The Constitution of Man by George Combe (1828) was probably the most influential phrenological work of the nineteenth century. It not only offered an exposition of the phrenological theory of the mind, but also presented Combe's vision of universal human progress through the inheritance of acquired mental attributes. In the decades before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the Constitution was probably the single most important vehicle for the dissemination of naturalistic progressivism in the English-speaking world. Although there is a significant literature on the social and cultural context of phrenology, the role of heredity in Combe's thought has been less thoroughly explored, although both John van Wyhe and Victor L. Hilts have linked Combe's views on heredity with the transformist theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In this paper I examine the origin, nature and significance of his ideas and argue that Combe's hereditarianism was not directly related to Lamarckian transformism but formed part of a wider discourse on heredity in the early nineteenth century.

  • BJH volume 48 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 48 / Issue 2 / June 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 April 2015, pp. f1-f2
    Print publication:
    June 2015
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  • The shock of the odd

  • Boris Jardine
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 48 / Issue 2 / June 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 April 2015, pp. 353-356
    Print publication:
    June 2015

  • When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).

Page 111 of 516