With most categories now apparently contestable in professional historiography, historians of science (so-called) surely feel especially vulnerable - not least those concerned with periods prior to the nineteenth century. If the 'early modern' dangerously implies teleology, the 'modern' implies a terminus from which the only exit seems to be the postmodern;1 all such labels invite accusations of progressivist historicism and, for the acutely trained historian of science, of latent whiggishness (for we are all postmodernists now). One could always obviate the difficulty of the term 'early modern' by ditching talk of 'modern' history altogether (its origins lying only in an opposition to 'ancient' history, after all), and speaking instead of 'recent' history; the conventional antecedent might be called history. But pragmatically speaking, there seems to be no great conceptual problem lurking behind this particular issue of terminology. Where one chooses to place the demarcation between differentiated periods is another question, of course. The present article takes a look at some of the most recent work on the period C.1500-C.1700, that is, on the late Scientific Revolution. It is of significance that such an article cannot claim to be even remotely comprehensive; I focus on a few issues that seem to be worthy of especial note.SCIENCE ETC.An additional burden for historians of pre-nineteenth-century science nowadays concerns the problem of 'science' itself: specialist historians seem increasingly agreed that science as we now know it is an endeavour born of the nineteenth century.2 Disagreement remains rife, however, about whether the general term 'science' may legitimately be used for earlier periods or, indeed, for other cultural regions than the European. The Latin word scientia and its cognates had specific meanings, at once extensive and restricted, in usages derived from academic, scholastic sources. To the extent that we might wish to confine ourselves to the categories of activity recognized by our historical actors, it would behoove us to the corresponding (and shifting) cultural boundaries as in some way definitive of our subject matter. Thus, the history of science for the not-so-recent period, which follows the now conventionally meaningless 'medieval' (older?) period, might confine itself to those fields of endeavour concerned with necessary demonstration of their conclusions, as well as with those areas in which controversy over such scientific status took place. Yet most scholars would regret the necessity of therefore including within the 'history of science' those subjects, such as the law or theology, which were often themselves regarded as scientiae.The usual solution to this problem has long been to put the word 'science' as an actor's category to one side in favour of focusing attention on those topical areas of study that seem to correspond, more or less, to areas of present-day scientific attention. The approach calls for selective attention to activities in the past the coherence of which is provided by that of activities in the present, and thus to run a grave risk of 'present-centredness' , the more expansive version of whiggishness.3 The danger here lies in imposing a systematic distortion on the categories of the past by heedlessly understanding historical activities as having been carried out under the categories of the present. Nonetheless, an effective recommendation to do just this, using the rubric 'protoscience', has recently been put forward by Pamela Smith.4 Smith uses the term 'protoscience' to designate studies that trace the early modern development of modern scientific objects, practices, and theories, what we might call the history of protosciences such as astronomy and physics. Her idea is to avoid the implication that such histories would take their objects of study as fixed by having their focus be upon the development of particular ways of thinking and practice that have come to constitute our contemporary sciences. …

The life of Portuguese Oratoriali priest Teodoro de Almeida (1722-1 804) spanned most of eighteenth century. His works marked Portuguese Enlightenment. He was persecuted by Marquis of Pombal, Minister for King Jose I, and had to endure a period of exile abroad, from 1768 to 1778, first in Spain and then in France. Returning to Portugal, he was co-founder, in 1779, with Duke of Lafoes, and Abbot Correia da Serra, amongst others, of Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. He was an advocate and a popularizer of Moderns - by opposition to Aristotelian-Scholastic natural philosophy - and ten-volume Recreasao filolofica, ou Dialogo sobre afilozofia natural, para instruccâo depessoas curiozas, que nao frequentarao as aulas (Philosophical recreation, or Dialogue on natural philosophy, for instruction of curious people who could not attend classes), giving an account of natural phenomena and advancements of experimental philosophy, was his masterpiece on subject. Almeida was, geographically, a peripheral natural philosopher, whose ideas on natural philosophy were moulded by three features: articulation of experimental philosophy with Enlightenment ideas about of reason and experiment; a theological understanding of nature merged with idea of harmony between natural philosophy and religious orthodoxy; and a methodological eclecticism opposing arguments of authority.In this paper I will analyse different agendas that can be found in Almeida's Philosophical recreation. I will also examine different types of audience involved in Almeida's project - lay versus expert and real versus virtual - and show in what ways these dichotomies are effective in describing Almeida's audience. I will also argue for bilingual nature of Almeida's work, in sense used by Mario Biagioli in regard to Galileo. This will be done in context of a discussion of manifold nature of popularization of knowledge taken to be an instance of process of appropriation of modern natural philosophy in eighteenth-century Portugal.PATHS OF MODERNIZATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PORTUGALDuring eighteenth century, proliferation of Academies for discussion of historical, literary or scientific questions, publication of books and periodicals of philosophical character, creation of public lectures on experimental philosophy and increasing number of booksellers all constituted marks of modernization. Opposed to Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, modernization was characterized by what Immanuel Kant called the public of reason:This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom - and most innocent of all that may be called freedom; freedom to make public of one's reason in all matters.... By public of one's reason I mean that which aman, as scholar, makes of it before reading public. I call private use that which a man makes of his reason in a civic post that has been entrusted to him.1Traceable throughout eighteenth-century Portugal, emergence of public of reason encompassed engagement of three groups of contributors: Ericeira Circle, so called Europeanized intellectuals, and Oratorians.2 These groups are used here as structuring units involved in appropriation of natural philosophy. But one should have in mind that they are not distinct groups. For instance, some Oratorians were Europeanized intellectuals and belonged to Ericeira Circle. On other hand, individual contributions cannot be always subsumed under collective trends.During first half of eighteenth century new practices of cultural, social and economic nature were furthered amongst a circle of friends and proteges of D. Francisco Xavier de Menezes, fourth Count of Ericeira. The Count of Ericiera was a member of Roman Academy of Arcadia and a fellow of Royal Society of London. He corresponded with learned Europeans such as Nicolas Boileau (whose Art poetique he translated into Portugese), Francesco Bianchini, Ludovico Muratori, and Pierre Bayle. …

Cameras have revealed how elephants are able to get a drink of fresh water when faced with a stagnant waterhole.A BBC team discovered that the tusked giants use their trunks to delicately siphon off clean liquid that has settled at the top of the dirty pool.The footage shows how the elephants move incredibly slowly to avoid stirring up any sediment.The Natural History Unit team said this was the first time that they had seen this resourceful behaviour.1INTRODUCTIONThe epigraph above, a 2009 press release from the BBC, draws the attention towards the process through which the British Broadcasting Corporation's Natural History Unit (NHU) came to be able to present its natural history film-makers as discoverers and natural history footage as discoveries, thus implicitly presenting itself as a producer of genuine knowledge of the natural world, without making any mention of the activities and works of scientific practitioners. Referring to the production of knowledge the field, Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler note: [c]ultural appropriation and ambiguous identity go with the territory, so to speak, of the field sciences.2 In the specific case of the relationship between field sciences and natural history film-making, Gregg Mitman for example demonstrates the transformative power of the latter, whose conventions and constraints have been defined outside the sphere of science, on the ways biological knowledge gets produced and consumed. In his study of the work of Iain Douglas-Hamilton on elephants, he suggests that adopting the narrative conventions of natural history film-making, most notably the emphasis on individual animals, lead the field biologist to create new systems of patronage and research3 alien to the culture of the twentieth-century life sciences.The historical study proposed this paper is informed by the constructivist approach to the public understanding of science. This approach underlines the fluidity, porosity and constructedness of the boundaries4 between the scientific endeavour and other modes of the production of knowledge of the natural world, and invites one, specifically, to examine how these boundaries are negotiated, displaced and maintained, according to the needs of social actors engaged fashioning their identity as trustworthy spokespersons for the natural world, with relation to the received source of such knowledge, science.5Two notions enable us to make sense of the way cultures of knowledge production are constituted, and claims to cognitive credibility are made and sustained; the notion of instrument and that of institution. Instruments can be seen as a material nucleus around which bearers of a given material culture can congregate and define a social space based on the expert use of the instrument question, and from which outsiders can be excluded. In this view the notion of instrument points towards the idea that matters of fact are socially constituted on the basis of a consensus in an acceptance of certain 'technologies' of fact creation.6 In the same vein, institutions can be thought about as social constructs and as rhetorical devices providing social groups with resources to assert their moral authority. In particular, they can be conceived of as means to naturalize beliefs, norms and values.7 This focus on two supra-individual categories, which directs the attention to the notion of group, should not, however, obscure the fact that the story told this paper is first and foremost about individuals engaged fashioning their personal identity.Before the First World War and during the interwar period, early natural history film-makers, the person, especially, of Cherry Kearton, successfully took possession of the ground left vacant by a vanishing imperial hunting elite, and established the practice of natural history film-making as a socially and morally legitimate conduct to appropriate, control, and enjoy the Empire's wilderness. …

A cultural system in two senses, bacteriology is underrepresented in the history and philosophy of science (significantly, however, it was the home science of the great prophet of underdetermination, Ludwik Fleck).1 Pasteur and Koch garner attention, but more as founders than practitioners.2 A quarter century ago, in 1987, Olga Amsterdamska called attention to the peculiarity of the enterprise, a biomedical praxis tied only loosely to natural history, to biology, or even to science.3 In this paper I shall examine the bacteriology presented in American textbooks between 1935 and 1950 in the terms of John Pickstone's Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology, and medicine (2000), and supporting work (2007, 2009).4 In the book, Pickstone identified world-reading (natural philosophy), natural history, analysis, and experimental synthesis as distinct modes of knowing, which had arisen in a broadly sequential relation. Later writings would extend the concept to complementary ways of working and make clearer the concurrence of multiple ways of working and knowing in particular times and domains - there was no teleology here, nor were the ways of knowing/working mutually exclusive.From a Pickstonian standpoint, bacteriology is exemplary in two respects. First, there, the categories of natural philosophy, natural history, analysis, and rationalized synthetic craft are almost always conflated though in changing ways. Second, any working-knowing divide dissolves. There is an enormous emphasis on the pragmatic and operational: theories may underwrite practice, but practice is more important.Bacteriology may fit Pickstone, but does Pickstonizing bring anything to it? Some years ago as a reviewer, I suggested that Ways of knowing had a Kuhn-like potential to inform our understanding of science (and technology and medicine). I thought it might link Kuhn to the emerging literature on technoscientific practice and enrich our characterization of large scale units of activity (i.e., paradigms). That enrichment in turn, might help to clarify their dynamics. Kuhn had seen the overturning of paradigms primarily in epistemic terms. Accumulated anomalies brought revolution. He had not gone far into distinguishing multiple ways of knowing and doing, or to exploring factors that might give a technoscientific enterprise extended and trans-epistemic viability. Pickstone's analytic, by contrast, is applicable not only to diachronic changes within a technoscientific enterprise, but also to synchronic differences within and among the enterprises in a particular time and place: it offers, in short, a complement not only to Kuhn, but to J. ? Merz, whose classic History of European thought in the nineteenth century was equally about ways of knowing. By offering a richer set of categories for appreciating what sorts of work 'working knowledges' might do, Pickstone's approach eased burdens of epistemic accountability without sacrificing the benefits of a systematic comparative framework.REPRESENTATIONS OF BACTERIOLOGYBy the 1930s, a third generation of bacteriologists practised a discipline distinct - in terms of institutional organization, textbook traditions, modes of training, and career possibilities - from botany and zoology; equally from the other main biomedical laboratory science, pathology; and from the applied, and significantly colonial, enterprises of genetics, parasitology and veterinary medicine. They had, as we shall see, subverted an incipient biochemistry, which challenged the sanctity of the bacterial species concept. They had spawned as a parallel endeavour, immunology, and its chief practical arm, serology: the relation of immunology to bacteriology would be ambiguous and often contested - serological specificity was a means of defining bacterial specificity, and yet many serologists leaned dangerously toward general physiology and physical chemistry. Any picture of a community of happy equals, with each bacteriologist investigating the wee beasties of his (or rarely her) chosen domain is misleading. …

In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murad III invited TaqI al-Din Muhammad Ibn-Ma'araf to build an observatory in Istanbul. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, TaqI al-Din constructed instruments and built mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the comet of 1577. Such astronomical and mechanical activity was documented, in 1580, by an anonymous painter who illustrated some miniatures in a manuscript titled Shahinshahnama. In the same decade, European astronomers, such as Tycho Brahe, built instruments and promoted a mechanical worldview of the celestial bodies. Although the scientific cultures coexisted for years, current historiography tends to present them as developing along separate linear paths. Yet, if we examine closely the peculiarities in one of the miniatures, we extract clues about a possible connection between TaqI al-Din's and the European mechanical culture.Astronomers played many roles within the court, where they relieved the anxieties of the rulers they served and helped provide those same rulers with displays of power and influence. During wars, times of crises or natural disaster, they were summoned to lengthy and usually tense meetings in which they looked for guidance from the stars. They also attended solemn receptions when ambassadors from far-flung nations brought with them gifts of scientific objects and books. More than any other early modern scientific figures, they operated within cross-cultural networks and were aware of adjacent cultures.1 Traditional historiography, however, tends to view them through a narrow cultural lens and cuts them off from those adjoining cultures.2In the historiography of Islamic TaqI al-Din emerges as a purely Islamic astronomer. Scholars have desired to show that even up to the seventeenth century, natural philosophy in Islam was still viable, and so they have looked toward TaqI al-Din as the last representative of its 'golden age'. They framed TaqI al-Din's achievements as an internal scientific product of an Islamic culture, operating without regard to Europe's astronomy and mechanical worldview.3 However, they gave little attention to the sources of TaqI al-Din's cutting-edge mechanical skills. As this paper argues, such mechanical skills were acquired via European sources and were incorporated into the ways he observed celestial bodies. The observations materialized into a new science, as he put it, which introduced to the Islamic world the European mechanical worldview of the universe. Moreover, TaqI al-Din not only presented the celestial mechanics as wheels of a machine, but more importantly he carried on his Hermetic belief that just as the artisan manipulates the laws of nature with the machine, so can the mechanic-astronomer manipulate the cosmic order with Hermeticism.SCIENTIFIC OBJECTS AS CLUESIn looking for clues to Taql al-Din's awareness of the rising, mechanical worldview in Europe we pay close attention not only to scientific writings but also to those that are non-scientific. Despite the fact that most of his writings are technical scientific texts, the titles of works, introductions, paintings, and other writers' texts (not necessarily in natural philosophy) give us access to the cultural crossroad where Taql al-Din was situated and where the margins of his surrounding cultural fields overlapped. There are more than a dozen scientific writings found in various libraries and archives in Istanbul that document his intellectual interest; their subjects vary from astronomical models for the planets to observational data of the comet of 1577, to manuscripts of mechanics with instructions how to build automata like clocks and watermills. However, there is also a piece of cultural writing, a manuscript of poetry titled Shahinshahnama (Book of the king of kings), which contains clues about the context within which he worked. The work was composed in 1580 by a Persian poet named 'Ala' al-Din al-Mansur. …