What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy ofMegatheriumwere shaped by the arrival in (...) London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genusGlyptodonby Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible. (shrink)

ArgumentThe revolutionary transformation in Russian science toward the Soviet model of research started even before the revolution of 1917. It was triggered by the crisis of World War I, in response to which Russian academics proposed radical changes in the goals and infrastructure of the country’s scientific effort. Their drafts envisioned the recognition of science as a profession separate from teaching, the creation of research institutes, and the turn toward practical, applied research linked to the military and industrial needs of (...) the nation. The political revolution and especially the Bolshevik government that shared or appropriated many of the same views on science, helped these reforms materialize during the subsequent Civil War. By 1921, the foundation of a novel system of research and development became established, which in its most essential characteristics was similar to the U.S. later phenomenon known as “big science.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines the exhibition of dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dinosaurs provide an especially illuminating lens through which to view the history of museum display practices for two reasons: they made for remarkably spectacular exhibits; and they rested on contested theories about the anatomy, life history, and behavior of long-extinct animals to which curators had no direct observational access. The American Museum sought to capitalize on the (...) popularity of dinosaurs while mitigating the risks of mounting an overtly speculative display by fashioning them into a kind of mixed-media installation made of several elements, including fossilized bone, shellac, iron, and plaster. The resulting sculptures provided visitors with a vivid and lifelike imaginative experience. At the same time, curators, who were anxious to downplay the speculative nature of mounted dinosaurs, drew systematic attention to the material connection that tied individual pieces of fossilized bone to the actual past. Freestanding dinosaurs can therefore be read to have functioned as iconic sculptures that self-consciously advertised their indexical content. (shrink)

Since Bruno Latour's discussion of a Sakhalin island map used by La Pérouse as part of a global network of “immutable mobiles,” the commensurability of European and non-European knowledge has become an important issue for historians of science. But recent studies have challenged these dichotomous categories as reductive and inadequate for understanding the fluid nature of identities, their relational origins, and their historically constituted character. Itineraries of knowledge transfer, traced in the wake of objects and individuals, offer a powerful heuristic (...) alternative, bypassing artificial epistemological divides and avoiding the limited scale of national or monolingual frames. Approaches that place undue emphasis either on the omnipotence of the imperial center or the centrality of the colonial periphery see only half the picture. Instead, practices of knowledge collection, codification, elaboration, and dissemination—in European, indigenous, and mixed or hybrid contexts—can be better understood by following their moveable parts, with a keen sensitivity toward non-normative epistemologies and more profound temporal frameworks. -/- . (shrink)

This article argues that the study of astronomical observing instruments, their transportation around the globe and the personal and professional networks created by such exchanges are useful conceptual tools in exploring the role of science in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The shipping of scientific instruments highlights the physical and material connections that bound the empire together. Large, heavy and fragile objects, such as transit circles, were difficult to transport and repair. As such, the logistical difficulties associated with their movement illustrate (...) the limitations of colonial scientific enterprises and their reliance on European centres. The discussion also examines the impact of the circulation of such objects on observatories and astronomers working in southern Africa, India and St Helena by tracing the connections between these places and British scientific institutions, London-based instrument-makers, and staff at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. It explores the ways in which astronomy generally, and the use of observing instruments in particular, relate to broader themes about the applications of science, the development of colonial identities, and the consolidation of empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. In considering these issues, the article illustrates the symbiotic relationship between science and empire in the period, demonstrating the overlap between political and strategic considerations and purely scientific endeavours. Almost paradoxically, as they trained their sights and their telescopes on the heavens, astronomers and observers helped to draw diverse regions of the earth beneath closer together. By tracing the movement of instruments and the arcs of patronage, cooperation and power that these trajectories inscribe, the role of science and scientific objects in forging global links and influencing the dynamics of the nineteenth-century British Empire is brought into greater focus. (shrink)

The American scientist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) stood at the forefront of the debate over the evolution of man. Study of his theories, however, has been overshadowed by the perception that racism influenced his ideas. Henry Fairfield Osborn argues that his views were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine. Osborn rejected ideas of primate ancestry and constructed his own non-Darwinian theory that human evolution was the long adventurous story of individuals and groups exerting personal will-power and inborn (...) characteristics to achieve both biological success and spiritual salvation. This biography charts Osborn's intellectual development, from a Christian childhood, through the influences of Arnold Guyot, James McCosh and T.H. Huxley, to his career at the American Museum of Natural History. (shrink)

The context of discovery and collection of Siwalik fossils had far less to do with science than with the ability to effect “translations” that helped bring together a wide range of social worlds, from the Doab Canal engineers working at the foot of the Hills, surgeon-botanists at the Saharanpur Botanic Gardens, other colonial officials, the native “Hindoo” diggers and collectors, to all of whom the Siwalik Hills was a “boundary object,” a common factor that bound their lives together. In this (...) colonial scientific collecting episode pertaining to the discovery of a new field of research, cooperation between different participants is achieved not by using methods of standardization but through an emphasis on greater heterogeneity, both in terms of the “allies” enrolled and fossils collected. Heterogeneity becomes a factor of strength rather than a weakness that deters the practice of science. This essay employs sociological reflection to examine the context of discovery, collection, and justification of a significant group of fossils in India in the 1830s–40s. (shrink)

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a (...) closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge. (shrink)