The case of Indian meteorite collections shows how, during the production of science, knowledge-making institutions such as museums were sometimes strongly linked with coercive institutions such as the police. If geological collecting in India in the Company period was mainly geared towards satisfying the demands of metropolitan science, the period after the 1850s saw a dramatic shift in the nature of collecting and the practice of colonial science, with the emergence of public museums in India. These colonial museums, represented by the Indian Museum, Calcutta, began to compete with the British Museum for the possession of locally formed collections in an effort to form an exemplary ‘Indian’ scientific collection. This resulted in conflicts which changed the very nature of colonial science. This paper shows how the 1860s marked a break with the past. A new breed of colonial scientist arrived, prepared successfully to challenge the status of the British Museum as the ‘centre of all sciences’ and to defend scientific institutions in the land of their practice, the colony. Rather than being driven by a feeling of scientific dependence or independence, or even the patriotic aspiration to build a national collection in London, it was scientific internationalism backed by the strength of local knowledge that now determined their practice.

Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: An Electronic Index, v. 1.0, hriOnline <http://www.sciper.org> [accessed 30 June 2005].

Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. vi+358. ISBN 0-262-03318-6. £25.95 (hardback).

Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan Topham (eds.), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xi+329. ISBN 0-521-83637-9. £45.00 (hardback).

Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan R. Topham (eds.), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. The Nineteenth Century Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xxv+296. ISBN 0-7546-3574-0. £47.50 (hardback).

In 1890 the staff of the Dublin Natural History Museum began a comprehensive rearrangement of the collection in their care. Inspired by visits to American museums and motivated by a desire to produce a truly educational display, curators arranged the zoological collection to include cases on the history and geographical distribution of animals. These cases explicitly depicted, in words and specimens, the main arguments of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Placed at a ground-floor entrance to the museum, the cases invited the visitor to examine the remainder of the collection in terms of evolution by natural selection. The exhibit was supplemented by guidebooks and several lecture-demonstrations, which served to further reinforce its messages. Through an analysis of the exhibit's development and contents, this paper will show how these cases reflected not only the status of evolutionary thinking in Ireland, but also the curators' goals for the future development of Irish natural history.

In many areas the eighteenth century was a starting point for the quantification of science. It was a period in which the mania for collecting led to the first attempts in systematization and classification. This penchant for collecting was not limited to natural history specimens or curiosities. Due in part to the development of mathematical and physical instruments, which became more widely available, scholars were confronted with the informative value of numbers. On the one hand, sequences of measurements appeared to be the key to the advancement of scientific knowledge, yet on the other hand the mathematical apparatus to deal with these data was still largely lacking. As a result of this the first meteorological networks organized in the eighteenth century all became bogged down in the large amount of information that was collected but could not be processed properly. This development is illustrated in a case study of an early Dutch meteorological society, the Natuur- en Geneeskundige Correspondentie Sociëteit (1779–1802). What were the factors that triggered this interest in the weather in the Netherlands? What were the goals and expectations of the contributors? What were their methodological strategies? Which instruments were used to measure which meteorological parameters? How was the stream of numbers generated by these measurements organized, collected and interpreted? An analysis of this process reveals that limits on the advancement of meteorology were not only imposed by instrumentation and organization. The financing, the scientific infrastructure of the old eighteenth-century Dutch Republic and the lack of a proper theoretical insight were also crucial factors that eventually frustrated the breakthrough of meteorology as an academic science in the Netherlands. This breakthrough was only achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century.