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Darwin returned to Shrewsbury in mid-June 1831 and spent that summer learning geology. He made geological maps of Shropshire and visited Llanymynech and other localities. From 3-20th August he joined Sedgwick on his tour of North Wales; they geologised west of Shrewsbury before travelling through Llangollen, Ruthin, Conwy to Bangor finally reaching Anglesey. Darwin left Sedgwick at Menai and walked...
In 1833 Sir John Herschel sailed to the British Cape Colony in southern Africa. It was a private voyage, the purpose of which was to undertake an astronomical survey of the southern heavens. But his private voyage was interpreted by both the British Government and the British public as a voyage of Imperial scientific exploration. Despite Herschel's explicitly private scientific intentions, he nonetheless...
Before computers were machines, they were people. They were men and women, young and old, well educated and common. They were the workers who convinced scientists that large-scale calculation had value. Long before Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC at the Moore School of Electronics, Philadelphia, or Maurice Wilkes designed the EDSAC for Manchester University, human computers had created...
Gaining an insight into what it meant to be a mathematical practitioner in the 17th century is difficult. People who thought themselves mathematical included navigators, sundial makers and book-keepers. For some, the simple use of instruments was construed as mathematical; for others, this was merely a 'showing of tricks'. One profession reliant on mathematics was land surveying. An analysis of this...
Joseph Hooker became one of the most influential botanists of his day. He is best remembered as a friend of Charles Darwin and an early advocate of natural selection. However, after returning to Britain from his first major voyage, Hooker spent years struggling to find a paid position that would allow him to pursue his studies of plant classification and distribution. As he worked to establish himself,...
Santiago Ramon y Cajal published the first of the three volumes of his principal life's work in 1899, and published the last volume in 1904. This book remains the definitive work on the morphology of the vertebrate nervous system. In it, Ramon y Cajal describes the structure and organization of virtually all parts of the nervous system and discusses his theories, including the neuron doctrine and...
C.P. Snow's articulation of a two-culture divide rested on a particular view of science that has been elaborated and superseded by interdisciplinary science studies. Thus, comparisons of the 'science wars' of recent years to the Snow-Leavis controversy fail to recognize basic structural differences between the two sets of debates. In this article, I present these differences and offer some views of...
Evolutionary theory aroused vigorous debate in the late-19th century, regarding both its scientific status and its sociocultural implications. Alfred Russel Wallace's lecture tour of North America, during 1886-1887, affords a striking insight into his particular interpretation of evolution and reveals the depth of his conviction that science was inseparable from ethical and political realities. Wallace's...
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