Wee people at London, are so humbly immersd in slavish business, & taken up wth providing for a wretched Carkasse; yt there's nothing almost, but what is grosse & sensuall to be gotten from us. If a bright thought springs up any time here, ye Mists & Foggs extinguish it again presently, & leaves us no more, yn only ye pain, of seeing it die & perish away from us. Humphrey Ditton to Roger Cotes, ca. 1703

THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

During the last decade of his life, Sir Isaac Newton took the measure of achievement. Probably shortly before 1725, Newton scribbled on the undated cover of a letter a brief list of those discoveries he believed belonged entirely ‘to the English’. Included were ‘the variation of the Variation’ (magnetic declination); the circulation of the blood; telescopic sights and the micrometer variously improved by his contemporaries, Robert Hooke and John Flamsteed; and ‘the Libration of the Moon’ likely in reference to Newton's own explanation of lunar eccentricity. Notably, this was not simply a personal calculation. Newton makes no mention of such controversial matters as the fluxional calculus, the refraction of light, or even the measure of universal gravitation, which he otherwise might have claimed as his own efforts. Even the private lights of the solitary genius could still accommodate a distinctly broader sense of the depth of national accomplishment.

The Royal Society in the eighteenth century cuts a poor figure in comparison with its robust parent of the seventeenth century. Contemporary satirists and modern historians alike have found little to recommend the weak and well-padded institution. After Newton's death in 1727, it was no longer the centre for natural philosophy, and even during his tenure as President the Society did not escape censure. Fascination with monstrous curiosities and antiquarian puzzles replaced serious scientific work, according to various detractors. Recently scholars have begun to re-evaluate this caricature and point to the myriad ways in which the Society cultivated natural philosophy and natural history during the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on one of the Society's frequently overlooked strengths: its extensive correspondence.

The Royal Society took as one of its patron saints Francis Bacon, who envisaged the great calling of science as acting as a means of effecting ‘the relief of man's estate’ through a partnership between philosophers and politicians. The object of this paper is to examine the extent to which this goal was realized from the time of the Society's foundation until the end of the eighteenth century. By doing so it attempts to analyse not only the character of the unreformed Royal Society but also that of the unreformed British state, for the argument of this article is that relations between the Royal Society and the government were not fundamentally different from relations between other academies and their governments.

What was different was rather the character of the British state with its oligarchically based patterns of patronage and influence, which contrasted with the clearer lines of government intervention evident in the more centralized and absolutist regimes which predominated on the Continent. From such a perspective the activities of the eighteenth-century Royal Society take on greater significance. The apparent character of a gentlemen's club is transmuted when one considers that in the social and political context of the eighteenth century such an institutional milieu helped to link the Royal Society to the workings of government. True, as the paper demonstrates, in the first half of the century such linkages were more potential than real, but in the second half of the century they began to be realized, setting the stage for a fruitful partnership between British science and government which was to develop in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries as the Royal Society acted as the principal agent of government advice – a belated realization of the Baconian ideal.

Just as visitors to eighteenth-century London were puzzled by the modest nature of the Hanoverian Court of St James compared to the glories of the Bourbon Versailles or the Romanov St Petersburg, so too have historians wondered at the lack of magnificence of the eighteenth-century Royal Society when compared to the Academies of continental Europe. Where, after the death of Newton, are the likes of Buffon, Clairaut, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier and Linnaeus to be found in Britain? Why, until George III (and then only sporadically and indirectly), was the Royal Society not particularly Royal at all, being left to fend for itself in the cramped quarters of Crane Court – closer to stock jobbers and grocers than to courtiers and state officials – until the end of the century? What great inventions are to be laid at the door of the Fellows of a Society whose founding rhetoric included that of utility? And what, finally, are we to make of the obscure country parsons who sent in to the Society their seemingly random papers on Roman coins, violent thunderstorms or two-headed calves? The Royal Society of London was not an Academy that hired Academicians of great theoretical or mathematical brilliance to bring glory to its princely patron or to solve technical problems. It was a club that elected its own Fellows and relied upon them, and not the King, for funds and action. They respected the plain fact, and those who could produce it, and were suspicious of generalizations and generalizers. While they revered their greatest Fellow, Sir Isaac Newton, they largely ignored his mathematizing methodology and concentrated on the production of novel experimental effects, accurate measurement and meticulous natural history. Their energy waxed and waned, but never disappeared; this issue of the BJHS is dedicated to showing some of them at work at an important eighteenth-century London club.

In the article “Politics by other means: Justus von Liebig and the German translation of John Stuart Mill's Logic” by Pat Munday, published in our December 1998 number, an unfortunate proof reading error occurred on p. 403. The third sentence should have read “Chemical methods, popular and professional publications about chemistry, technological applications, promoting the careers of former students and even politics – all were central concerns stemming from Liebig's notion of chemistry as the central science.” We apologize to Professor Munday for this error.

On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon (1865–1931) addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’

Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon's project was a compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here. First, however, it will be instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening in on the deliberations.

For over half a century, from 1924 to 1986, the Electrical Association for Women (EAW) worked to modernize the British home by bringing the blessings of labour-saving appliances to the aid of British women. Adopting a strategy of facilitation, the EAW sought, on the one hand, to educate women about electricity and its advantages in the home, encourage them to demand greater access to that electricity and keep them abreast of new developments in appliances and the infrastructure (from a national grid to sufficient outlets) necessary for enjoying them. On the other hand, the organization sought to discover the real needs and desires of the women themselves, and to bring this forcibly to the attention of the electrical industry in Great Britain ; to make the ‘women's point of view’, as it was called, a factor in the production, distribution and application of electricity in the home.

Although the very masculine electrical industry was a decisive part of both the EAW's context, and of its financial and advisory structure, the group proudly insisted that it was a women's organization in which women addressed other women about women's concerns and well-being. In its early years, the excitement of women coming together in a modern cause was palpable, but as the leadership aged and electricity turned from modern vision to commonplace reality, the almost religious zeal and pace of activities began to falter. A late-hour attempt to highlight nuclear power plants as evidence of a renewed and equally exciting modern moment fell short, and in 1986 the EAW quietly dissolved itself, the casualty of large social changes, some of which it had proudly helped to bring about.

It has been a singular privilege to preside over the BSHS as it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. As we share our festivities with the British Association annual meeting at Leeds, I am doubly honoured to be giving this address. A fiftieth anniversary is a sentimental occasion. It is a moment when we can express our gratitude to our many friends and forebears who by their dedication have enabled the Society to grow and flourish. That so many of those friends should be with us to share in our celebration is a source of delight to us all. To our past presidents, former editors, officers and councillors, I extend the warmest welcome. And to our visitors and guests from overseas, I should like to say how much we value your presence and contribution to this conference.

Is there not, then, an incongruous note in my title – a hint of foreboding perhaps? If tempted to speculate on its source one might have wondered whether it is in those rumours we sometimes hear that the end of science is nigh. When we can almost clone humans and almost explain the moment of creation, what is there left? Might the end of science not spell the end of its history? A moment's reflection suggests that this cannot be. After all, the question why science should have come to an end when it did would still keep historians in business. And the more intriguing question of why the end of science has been proclaimed at the end of each of the last four centuries would keep us in business even longer!