Over three centuries after the 1711 discovery in the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris of a square-section stone bas-relief (the Pillar of the Boatmen) with depictions of several deities, both Gaulish and Roman, the blocks comprising it were analyzed as a symbol of Parisian power, if not autonomy, vis-à-vis the Roman Empire. Variously considered as local, national, or imperial representations, the blocks were a constant object of admiration, interrogation, and speculation among antiquarians of the Republic of Letters. They were also boundary objects - products of the emergence of a Parisian archeology dated from 1711. If this science reflected the tensions and ambiguities of a local regime of knowledge situated in a national context, it also helped to coordinate archeological work between different institutions and actors. This paper would like to assess the specific role played by the Pillar of the Boatmen as a fetish object in this process. To what extent could an archeological artifact influence this reshaping of urban representation, this change of scales? By following the three-century career of the pillar's blocks as composite objects, which some have identified as merely stones or a column, it is possible to understand the multiple dimensions that defined the object as archeological - as an artifact that contributed to the relocating of the historical city center - and the multiple approaches that transform existing remains into knowledgeable objects.

This essay challenges the dominance of the spherical earth model in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Western European thought. It examines parallel strains of Latin and vernacular writing that cast doubt on the existence of the southern hemisphere. Three factors shaped the alternate accounts of the earth as a plane and disk put forward by these sources: (1) the unsettling effects of maritime expansion on scientific thought; (2) the revival of interest in early Christian criticism of the spherical earth; and (3) a rigid empirical stance toward entities too large to observe in their entirety, including the earth. Criticism of the spherical earth model faded in the decades after Magellan's crew returned from circuiting the earth in 1522.

This paper analyses the rise of synthetic nitrogen in Great Britain and its empire, from the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than focus solely on technological innovations and consumption statistics, it seeks to explain how nitrogen was a central element in the expansion of a form of agricultural governance, which needed simplified, stable, and seemingly universal input/output formulae. In the first half of the twentieth century, nitrogen was thus gradually constructed as a global indicator of development, as it was particularly adapted to scientific and political regimes increasingly relying upon abstraction and quantification. Yet, the history of nitrogenous fertilizers in the interwar years also shows that this cannot be reduced to a simple story of triumphant modernity, as their development and globalization was imperfect, unstable, accompanied by resistance and the resilience or emergence of other models. Rather than assuming an all-powerful "state" project, the paper thus seeks to recover the multiplicity of actors, and attempts to account for the rise of nitrogenous fertilizers; not just as the progressive application of a technological breakthrough, but as a difficult process embedded in technological, financial, and military constraints, corporate strategies, political imperatives, and the changing institutional framework of agricultural research.

The Irish chemist Richard Kirwan (1733–1812) is remembered among historians for his resourceful defense of the phlogiston theory of combustion, but his pursuit of the sciences of the environment has been little studied. This paper considers his work in Ireland in the 1790s, especially on mineralogy and meteorology, and situates it against the backdrop of elite projects for national improvement and armed insurrection against British rule. Kirwan is viewed as having the outlook of a metropolitan intellectual, which he struggled to reconcile with the circumstances of Irish provinciality and an emergent – sometimes militant – nationalism.

Charles Darwin built a world around an implied metaphysics of time that treated deep time as something qualitatively different from ordinary, experienced time. He did not simply require a vast amount of time within which his primary evolutionary mechanism of natural selection could operate; in practice, he required a deep time that functioned according to different rules from those of ordinary, “shallow” time. The experience of the naturalist occupied shallow time, but it was from that experience that Darwin necessarily had to build his arguments concerning a transformism that took place on an entirely different temporal scale. Much of his reconstruction of what took place in deep time relied on inferences drawn from taxonomic classification, and those inferences in turn depended to a large degree on conclusions reached through the already-established practices of his fellow non-transformist naturalists. By bootstrapping his transformist arguments, focused on both natural and sexual selection, with non-transformist classificatory judgments, Darwin attempted to convince his fellow naturalists of the truth of evolution in deep time. In other words, while Darwin argued for the existence of selectionist processes themselves in contemporary shallow time, their transformist consequences could only be traced out in deep time, being evidenced by both contemporary and paleontological slices, or laminae, of shallow time. This served to protect transformism from the dangers of unorthodoxy by preserving uniformity within shallow time.

This paper highlights the significance of popular astronomy lectures in British theatres during the first half of the nineteenth century. The popular astronomy lecturing trade inherited from Enlightenment natural philosophy discourses. A ‘theatrical turn’ developed in the late eighteenth century and became extensive by the 1820s. Lecturers moved astronomy displays into theatres and used theatrical facilities, which resulted in a distinct type of show blending scientific instruction with sensational amusement. Lent was especially high season for this business in a metropolitan entertainment market. Pre–eminent cases of private entrepreneurs in this trade included William Walker, Deane Franklin Walker, George Bartley, and C. H. Adams. By exploring astronomy lectures in theatres, this paper also shows the spatial influence of the site on the format and style of the performance: the benefits and constraints of a theatre made a theatrical astronomy lecture distinct from others at a formal institution.

Gianantonio Tadini (1754–1830) is the little known protagonist in an important experiment carried out in Bergamo between 1794 and 1795. Based on the measurement of the deviation of a falling body, the experiment owes much to the one that was conducted by Giambattista Guglielmini (1760–1817) in Bologna in 1791, which aimed at demonstrating Earth’s rotation. Tadini’s experimental work represents the most successful attempt carried out before the 19th century, and it led to the first correct formulation of deviation’s measurement. In spite of this, it is not well represented in the general literature on the history of experiments intended to show diurnal Earth’s motion.1 The discovery of Tadini’s diary of experiments as well as some notes and a part of his correspondence – preserved as manuscripts in the Angelo Mai municipal library in Bergamo – allows us now to reconstruct the history of Tadini’s experiment and of his reasoning about Guglielmini’s work. In this paper, I describe the genesis and the development of Tadini’s experiment, clarify the role played by the different personalities involved and set these trials against the background of the widest history of proofs on diurnal Earth’s rotation carried out in Europe in those years.

INTRODUCTIONSince mid-nineteenth century people have talked and written about applied Whether in calls for a new kind of education, counter-claims for pure or advertising achievements of industry, use of expression has been a process through which many people have interpreted their worlds, and indeed nature of modernity. Together with such counterparts as rule of law and progress, applied has functioned as what has been called a key word, key or ideograph.' The political historian Geoffrey K. Roberts once expressed frustration of political scientists with such terms which served as both the vocabulary of political and as language of political rhetoric. The aims of first are served by precision, of second by obfuscation and generality.2 Yet, despite such ambiguity in their meaning, use of such terms as applied science, has persisted, and so has challenge of understanding their appeal, uses and connotation. Ironically, perhaps, significance of applied is confirmed by frequency of assertion of what it is not: particularly technology.3This paper is methodological. Not in itself an exploration of history of term applied science, which will be topic of a separate article; it is intended to facilitate professional historians', and ultimately also public's, engagement with thinking about science. This is a part of cultural baggage of many people outside academe and yet is often treated as an uninterpretable thing. The importance of studying such concepts was urged by Otto Mayr almost forty years ago when he suggested that relationship perceived between science and technology in past was an important historical problem. Although such studies have been warmly applauded, this is, in practice, a genre hitherto addressed but rarely.4 We still do not have many obvious precedents for a study of such a nineteenth and twentieth-century category as applied Few would argue for changelessness of concept over a period of centuries, yet nature of change has not been explored.5Questions about construction of science are concerned not only with elite philosophy, but with conventions widely accepted through press, media and politics, as well as academe. Historians have conducted important work on construction of science in public sphere, through for instance important category of commemorative event, such as Watt, Faraday and Lavoisier anniversaries.6 As significant to our understanding of co-construction, in broader community of science studies, have been analyses of political and social movements whether associated with nuclear power or biotechnology which have been effective in forcing their points of view on to a political agenda.7 We cannot understand 1950s concepts of potential for nuclear energy simply by looking at anticipations of scientists and engineers. Students of public understanding of science today and even policy makers are comfortable in their rejection of a top down model of issues, and centrality of public engagement.8In this paper, I examine implications of concepts of science actively being developed in public sphere, rather than being served up there cold in dilute form. The means by which concepts of applied were shared and shaped in Britain in late nineteenth century will be used as an illustration to provide a sense of historical reality to what otherwise might seem abstract theory. The term was typical of a wider genre of phrases used about science: it had acquired a rich variety of associations; it was heavily-freighted in different ways in a variety of contexts. It was characteristically discussed, and functioned, in such media of public sphere as newspapers, after-dinner discussions and public lectures.From seminal contribution of Cooter and Pumphrey to Isis 2009 focus issue on popularisation, case for taking seriously discussions in public sphere has been forcefully made and widely accepted by historians. …

INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING SCIENCEWilliam Wright, an eighteenth-century Scottish doctor and Jamaican botanist, was comfortable communing with plants. As he put it in the prefatory discussion of botany for his Hortus Jamaicensis, a three folio volume collection of some six hundred plant specimens from the island:The Man who inclines to this happy turn is never at a loss for society, whether in the Garden, In the Field, on the bleak summit of the mountain, In the plenteous Vale, in the sweet range of the Hedge Row or in the cool umbrage of the Wood, He never fails to meet with numerous acquaintances, whether adapted to the purposes of Health, Food, agriculture or to gratify the Sight, Smell or Taste.'Materialized into Wright's Hortus - via dried and pressed leaves, stalks and seeds, and the accompanying handwritten text - were both the fruits of and the basis for other forms of communication with a variety of interlocutors. Its elaborate title page, which imitated the conventions of a printed book, and its presentation to David Steuart Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan and a fellow of the Royal Society, opened up realms of gentlemanly conversation and scholarly debate about natural history and natural philosophy. Its plant descriptions also occasionally signalled other oral encounters. Wright's specimen of sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), that most significant plant for eighteenth-century Jamaica's system of plantation slavery, took up a full page in the Hortus. The text on the opposite leaf noted that 'The Sugar Cane is probably a Native of Arabia as well as of Guinea and the Continent of South America. The new Negroes brought here well know its use and give an account of their boiling it into Syrup in Africa. Finally, in its discussion of the medical uses of plants, Wright's Jamaican herbarium let the doctor speak to his patients. For example, for Lignum Vitas as a treatment for the Lues Venerea, he noted that 'Ten drams of Gum Guiacum Six Drams of Speices of Edinburgh] Treacle and thirty drams of Corrosive Sublimate infused in a Bottle of Rum is our mercurial Tincture. Two tea Spoonfulls morning and Evening in a pint of Decoction made of Sarspariila & Lignum Vitae is a dose for a grown person. He would expect a cure in six weeks.2Wright's Hortus begins to demonstrate the range of ways in which speech was involved in the making of eighteenth-century natural historical (and natural philosophical) knowledge, and the ways in which spoken words flowed around and into and out of texts (in both script and print), images and objects such as dried specimens and mounted collections. It is not the case that speech has been entirely neglected in the history of science, although considerably more attention has been paid to texts, images and objects.3 For example, much has been made of the norms of civil conversation that underpinned truth-telling in the early Royal Society and of the contemporaneous chatter and clatter of coffeehouse lecturers and their audiences.4 Neither has the relationship between talk and text gone unexamined. Both Jim Secord and Adrian Johns, in their close examinations of the making and use of books in the construction of scientific knowledge, have found themselves drawn into worlds where what was spoken was of utmost significance. For Johns, it was the oral transactions conducted between natural philosophers and stationers in the printshops of late seventeenth-century London that were crucial to what got made and credited as knowledge of nature.5 For Secord, the of mapped out across mid-nineteenth-century Britain in his analysis of the reception of Vestiges of the natural history of creation is, in many ways, also a geography of speaking. This ranges across, and differentiates between, the gossip of London's literary salons, Albert reading aloud to Victoria in their Buckingham Palace drawing room, the high table mutterings of Oxbridge dons, Liverpudlian prelates denouncing evolutionary thought from their pulpits, and the excited speculations of Halifax mechanics. …