The simple belief that Galileo ‘invented’ dynamics or kinematics was destroyed long ago. Yet there can be no doubt of the revolution in ideas of motion associated with his name. The paper examines some recent work in this field and evaluates the nature and extent of Galileo's contributions.

The concept of popularization, in the present context, implies the existence of a reading public interested in science, together with a corpus of scientific knowledge, part of which, in its range and complexity, was outside the limits of the general understanding.

The response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.

The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others.

The beginning of the kinetic theory of gases is usually assigned to the year 1738, when Daniel Bernouilli's Hydrodynamica appeared at Strasbourg. The famous tenth section of this book pursued some of the consequences of the assumption that ‘elastic fluids’ consist of innumerable tiny particles in rapid motion. It was, as everyone knows, forgotten for many decades.

The early years of the nineteenth century were a time of new life and fresh thought in the scientific institutions of England and France. Despite the domination of the public scene by the rise and fall of Napoleon, scientists in the two countries were able to share their discoveries and work together. Napoleon even encouraged this; for example, foreigners were not barred from competing for the scientific prizes he offered. At a time when many of his compatriots were detained in France, Sir Humphry Davy was given special permission to travel freely because the object of his journey was scientific. His travels in France gave Davy the opportunity of meeting many of his most eminent contemporaries. The best scientific work in Europe was being done in Paris at the Collège de France and at the Ecole Polytechnique. H. R. Yorke, an English journalist in Paris in 1814, in spite of his prejudice against the Institut National affirms that ‘it is but a tribute of justice which every man owes to superiour genius to declare that in point of real science or experimental philosophy France is Without a Rival’.