The visual culture of the sciences has become a focus for increasing attention in recent literature. This is partly a result of the concern with examining the material culture of the sciences that has developed over the last few decades. Increasing attention has also been devoted to understanding science as spectacle and to trying to understand the spaces where scientific performances, variously understood, take place. This essay surveys some aspects of the visual culture of the sciences in the long nineteenth (...) century. I examine the way visual scientific performances---such as magic lantern shows, optical illusions, and public experiments---were put together. I suggest in particular that if we want to understand the ways in which nineteenth‐century sciences appealed to their audiences we need to pay close attention to these kinds of performances, their performers, and the material and social resources that were deployed in their staging. (shrink)

One of the educational by-products of German botanical scholarship was the publication of sets of large ‘wall diagrams’ for use in the lecture-room. Most British University Departments of Botany dating from the period before the first world war probably had at least one of these sets. In my own department I have used these excellent diagrams occasionally, realizing that they combined clarity, size and accuracy to an unrivalled extent.This passage from a recent essay by S. M. Walters forms an appropriate (...) introduction to the topic of this paper. From the start, it should be noticed that the use of such diagrams was by no means limited to botany nor to university studies. As will become clear, they were one of the most important media for the teaching and learning at different levels of education and within different fields. (shrink)