Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London

Following a series of workshops funded by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the papers in this special issue provide new perspectives on the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820). Moving beyond a focus on Banks's work with Captain Cook's first voyage of exploration to the Pacific, the papers expand on, while challenging, views of Banks as a 'centre of calculation' and all-powerful agent of science and imperialism in Georgian Britain. Banks is shown to have relied on a variety of expert men and women as actors and audiences for botany, operating with more diversified agendas and practices than previous pictures of him have suggested...

The interests of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in natural history and evolution took them to remote parts of the globe on hazardous, multi-sensory journeys that were ultimately about collecting. This paper introduces a methodology for exploring these complex experiences in more detail, informed by historical geography, anthropology, textual analysis and the geo-humanities. It involves looking for evidence of the richly stimulating and often challenging sensory dynamics within which they collected and connected data, observations, images, specimens, memories and ideas...

Although the historical connections between anatomy and the visual arts have been explored in quite some depth, especially in the cases of early modern anatomical drawing, sculpting, the making of wet preparations and wax modelling, the role of artistic techniques in the creation of corrosive preparations has received little attention thus far. This is remarkable, as there appear to be significant similarities between casting techniques like those employed by the influential artist Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508-85) and anatomical corrosive techniques...

This paper examines the Royal Geographical Society's provision and management of scientific instruments to explorers and expeditions in the century following its foundation in 1830. Assessment of the Society's directives concerning appropriate scientific instruments for the conduct of geography reveals the emergence (slow and uneven) of policies concerning the assignment of instruments. From examination of Council minutes and related manuscript sources, the paper documents the numbers of instruments acquired by the Society, by whom used, for what scientific purpose and in which parts of the world...

By the early decades of the nineteenth century, with surveys established as the weapon of choice for the fiscal military state, their instrumentation provided a focal point for radical attacks on political establishments. This paper considers a notorious dispute over mastery of iron in the instrumentation of magnetic surveying that took place in the 1830s between an Admiralty committee and the Reverend William Scoresby, a whaler-turned-clergyman. Scoresby staked his claim by drawing on the labour law of the whaleboats, a culture peculiarly preoccupied with the properties of bone and blubber, ink and skin, parchment and iron, where magnetism was forged in the 'combinations', as Scoresby put it, of such specific materials...

This article describes an important manuscript discovered recently in the Royal Society archives, and presents evidence that it is the holograph of Galileo's  Letter to Benedetto Castelli of 21 December 1613. It was in this letter that Galileo first set out his ideas on the relation between science and religion, and defended Copernican astronomy from charges of being contrary to the Holy Scriptures. The text of the  Letter  has hitherto been known only through manuscript copies, namely the 12 used by Antonio Favaro in his critical edition of 1895...

This paper examines the diary of Charles Blagden, physician and secretary of the Royal Society between 1784 and 1797. It argues that the form and content of Blagden's diary developed in response to manuscript genres from a variety of contexts, including the medical training that Blagden undertook at the start of his career, the genre of the commonplace book, and contemporary travel narratives. Blagden was interested in the workings of memory and in the association of ideas. This paper reveals the diary's nature as an aid to memory and an information management tool...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Sir Peter Medawar experimentally demonstrated immunological tolerance through his tissue transplantation experiment in the early and mid-1950s. He made a central contribution to modern biomedicine by showing that genetically distinct cells introduced into a body during its foetal phase could not only be permanently tolerated but also make the host accept any subsequent skin grafts from the original cell donors. However, this discovery had only a limited clinical applicability. None could practise Medawar's method on human foetuses in preparation for their future need for organ or skin transplantation...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Sir Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944) was the first Indian chemist to achieve high international reputation. Originally trained at the University of Edinburgh, he worked for many years at Presidency College in Calcutta and then at Calcutta University. He built up a remarkable school of chemical research by attracting many outstanding students to work with him and published about 150 papers-many of them in leading British and German journals. Ray was highly respected by his British peers and was the first Indian of that era to be nominated for FRS, in 1913...

Royal Society Classified Papers XVI contains a letter written in not one but two seemingly mysterious scripts. As a result, this letter has remained until now effectively illegible, and has been miscatalogued. These scripts are rare examples of the written forms devised by John Wilkins to accompany his proposals for an artificial language, published under the auspices of the Royal Society in 1668. This article therefore first correctly identifies and decodes this letter, which is shown to be from the Somersetshire clergyman Andrew Paschall to Robert Hooke in London in 1676, and then surveys other surviving texts written in Wilkins's scripts or language...

As always seems to be the case these days, this has been quite a year. Today, I want to explore some of the key issues facing the science community and the Society's engagement with them. They are: our future relationship with the EU, and more generally with other countries; science funding; and what is needed to make optimal use of funding.

Recent years have seen the development of a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of scientific naturalism in the nineteenth century. It has become apparent that scientific naturalism did not emerge sui generis in the years following the publication of Charles Darwin's On the origin of species (1859), but was present, if only in incipient form, much earlier in the century. Building on recent scholarship, this article adopts a geographically focused approach and explores debates about geology and phrenology-two of the diverse forms of knowledge that contributed to scientific naturalism-in late-Georgian Belfast...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality. Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840-1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist or more orthodox in their religion, found reconciliation. Unlike Wallace, Buckley emphasized the lawful evolution of morality and of the soul, drawing from the theological tradition of traducianism...

Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a 'love of truth', but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question 'why?'...

In mid July 1860, the Athenaeum published a summary of the discussions about Charles Darwin's theory that took place at the British Association meeting in Oxford. Its account omitted the famous exchange between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Huxley, the rising man of science. A fuller report of the meeting was published a week later in a local weekly, the Oxford Chronicle , but this has gone unnoticed by historians. The Oxford Chronicle supplies a new version of Wilberforce's question to Huxley, with more material about religious objections to human evolution and the proper role of authority in popular scientific discussions...

Prior to becoming a secretary of the Royal Society in 1784 Charles Blagden ( bapt . 1748- d . 1820) served as a surgeon in the British army during the Revolutionary War in America. In the two unpublished letters of 1778 discussed here, Blagden provides his Welsh friend John Lloyd (1749-1815) with a vivid description of the current state of affairs in America, from a British perspective, and with insights into continuing scientific endeavour in a time of war. The letters illustrate the attempt that two men made to keep alive an intellectual life and are testimony to the rapidity with which matters of scientific interest could be disseminated in the eighteenth century, even during a major international conflict...