This paper aims to show that the seventeenth-century conception of mechanics as the science of particles in motion founded on universal laws of motion owes much to the employment of a new conceptual resource – the physics of motion developed within optics. The optical analysis of reflection was dynamically interpreted through the mechanical analogy of rebound. The kinematical and dynamical principles so employed became directly applicable to natural phenomena after the eventual transformation of light's ontological status from that of an Aristotelian ‘quality’ to a corpuscular phenomenon, engendered by the rise of atomism during the first half of the seventeenth century. The mechanization of light led to a conceptual shift from the analogical employment of dynamical principles in the physical interpretation of reflection to the mechanical generalization of optical principles – the direct application of kinematical and dynamical principles of reflection to mechanical collisions. This first part of the paper traces out the first conceptual shift from Aristotle's original analogy of reflection as rebound to its full concretization. A second part will trace out the second conceptual shift, from the full concretization of this analogy to the axiomatization of already generalized kinematical and dynamical principles of reflection into laws of nature and of motion.

Sir Kenelm Digby's A Late Discourse … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (1658) is usually read in the context of seventeenth-century explanations of the weapon-salve. The salve supposedly worked by being applied to the weapon that made a wound rather than to the wound itself. But Digby's essay was as much an effort to claim priority for a powdered version of the sympathetic cure as an explanation of how the cure worked. A close examination of Digby's claims in the Late Discourse in the context of his own earlier work and of works by his contemporaries shows his priority claim to have been false. It was recognized as such by his most knowledgeable associates. The story of Digby's fabrications offers a case study of the generic and rhetorical terms in which seventeenth-century English thinkers made and challenged natural-philosophical claims.

The phenomenon of the Giant's Causeway in the north of Ireland has attracted much attention over five centuries. This essay recounts the formative years between 1688 and 1708 of the Giant's Causeway as a field site and ‘philosophical landscape’ in the light of recent research on the historical geographies of scientific knowledge. This research has provided new perspectives on field science, emphasizing the spatial character of the field and its discursive formation in different spaces. A view of the field as a self-contained unit in which science is practised is rendered problematic. Instead, it is seen as part of a network of intersecting locales within which scientists and science circulate. This essay draws upon this work, exploring and mapping the spaces and techniques used by late seventeenth-century natural philosophers in London and Dublin to generate observational and conceptual knowledge of the Giant's Causeway. In doing so, the paper contributes to an understanding of the spaces of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, of the knowledge networks within which the virtuosi operated and of the earth science field site.

The 1830s and 1840s witnessed a European movement to accumulate data about the terrestrial environment, enterprises including the German and British geomagnetic crusades. This movement was not limited to geomagnetic studies but notably included an important meteorological component. By focusing on observation practices in sedentary and expeditionary contexts, this paper shows how the developing fields of geomagnetism and meteorology were then intimately interlinked. It analyses the circulation and cross-connections of the practices and discourses shared by these two research fields. Departing from a Humboldtian historiography, the paper especially stresses the role of Adolphe Quetelet, director of the Brussels Observatory, whose importance in the development of the earth sciences has until now been largely neglected. It reassesses the involvement of the French scientific community in the British and German geomagnetic crusades, moving beyond the well-known account of Arago's opposition to these undertakings. It is hoped thereby to contribute to a better historical understanding of the renewal of the earth sciences in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

This essay analyses the development of the Carrel-Dakin treatment for infected wounds during the First World War to explore the relationship between industrialized warfare and experimental medicine, the politics of standardization, and the relationship between the theories and practices of physiology and scientific management. It first describes the intellectual and institutional context from which Alexis Carrel's wound research emerged: experimental medicine and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Next the story moves to the experimental laboratory hospital on the Western Front and the quantification of wounds. Then it considers the propaganda and training campaign in support of the method at the War Demonstration Hospital located on the institute's New York City campus. The de-skilling inherent in the standardization of surgical practice was a response to the incompetence of inexperienced military surgeons, but also an attempt to restructure the medical profession into a hierarchical organization capable of being administered by elite scientist–physicians. Underlying the narrative is the paradox of simultaneous segregation of the biological and the social through laboratory practices and their conflation through the organic analogy.

Focusing on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies as a case, this article uses economies of research tool exchange to develop a new way of characterizing cross-disciplinary research. Throughout its life from 1960 to 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies hosted scholars from several disciplines. However, there were two different research cultures at the Center. With its directors and patrons committed to a philosophy that equated creative science with eclectic search for and invention of new tools, the Center's initial interdisciplinary research culture emphasized the exchange of ideas and methods. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's multidisciplinary economy involved researchers working in parallel.