Abstract Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) was the first to observe single-celled organisms. Between 1673 and 1723 he sent 189 letters containing scientific observations to the Royal Society, 114 of which were edited into 117 published articles in the Philosophical Transactions; he also self-published 153 letters in Dutch and Latin. He compiled a selection of these correspondences into a Latin text, entitled Arcana Naturae Detecta. Here, we report a rare second edition of Arcana Naturae Detecta (1722), which includes original inscriptions confirming its acquisition in 1746 for the Carmelite College of Liberal Arts of San Joaquín in Mexico City. The presence of this book in an academic institution in Mexico City, a mere 24 years after its publication in Europe, changes our understanding of early microscopy by adding tangible material evidence and context to its global circulation and its reception in the Americas.
Valued mainly for their spermaceti oil, and the clean, bright light it produces, sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) populations have been globally reduced in number by three quarters since large-scale hunting began in the 1700s. Sperm whale oil and spermaceti have been used since ancient times for lighting and medicine, but, as we argue in this article, the invention of spermaceti candles was a detonator event both for humans and for sperm whales. Taking perspectives from environmental and energy history, this paper analyses sperm whale hunting in the North and South Atlantic and the concomitant transformation of animal body parts into material commodities and, ultimately, light. Our discussion revolves around a specific whaling operation in colonial Brazil, in the second half of the 1700s, as a case study for understanding how knowledge and technological transfer were fostered by empirical expertise and technical innovation. We show how Portuguese interest in spermaceti had been growing since the mid-eighteenth century and describe the endeavours undertaken to discover, exploit and commercialize this source of illumination. Fundamentally, we are interested in how the pursuit of light impacted an ecologically vulnerable non-human species but also stimulated technological innovation and the production of new forms of knowledge.
This article examines Ruggiero Boscovich's didactic poetry as a means for reassessing his intellectual development. While rooted in the Jesuit tradition of Latin didacticism, Boscovich's poetic work underwent significant transformations as he moved across different scientific and cultural environments. By tracing the evolution of his poem on solar and lunar eclipses-from its early formulation within Jesuit pedagogical models to its later reconfigurations in the Newtonian milieu of England and the Lucretian literary climate of France-the article argues that these changes reflect Boscovich's strategic ability to adapt the presentation of his ideas to new contexts. His poetic production thus illuminates, among the many dimensions of his work, the negotiation and public shaping of his scientific identity.
Despite the growing number of studies on images of the plague, illuminated manuscripts of Aldobrandino of Siena's regimen of health, the R & eacute;gime du corps (1256), have not yet received the attention they deserve. Created over a period of more than two hundred years-from before the onset of the Second Plague Pandemic, through the years of the Black Death, and into a period of recurring epidemics, these manuscripts allow us to examine whether, how, and when medieval illuminators adapted visual traditions to new conceptions and realities of disease. The images illustrate the chapters on the ambient air, on pestilence-a concept predating the Black Death that referred to epidemic diseases in general-and on healthy and unhealthy cities. The corpus features unique visualizations of the medical concept of miasma and images of sick people in urban settings. It also includes a striking depiction of a distressed patient pointing to his armpit. While drawing on established visual strategies, this image clearly reflects the illuminator's direct experience of bubonic plague. Dating from the time of the Black Death, it is the oldest known clinical visualization of a plague victim.
This article presents the discovery and analysis of Pietro Andrea Mattioli's annotated copy of the 1544 Discorsi on Dioscorides' De materia medica, preserved at the Biblioth & egrave;que nationale de France. The marginalia reveal Mattioli's working methods during the preparation of the expanded Valgrisi edition of 1548 and document the substantial transformation of the text from a medical textbook into a natural historical encyclopaedia. The annotations include additions, deletions, corrections, new quotations, and critical remarks directed at contemporary authors such as Leonhart Fuchs and Antonio Musa Brasavola. They also show how Mattioli expanded the original scope of the work by integrating personal observations and practical information on simples and their uses. The discovery provides rare evidence of the editorial process behind one of the most influential Renaissance medical commentaries and illustrates how a philological enterprise developed into a pedagogical and natural historical project.
This article examines nineteenth-century Portuguese horticultural exhibitions during the Liberal period, situating them within broader European exhibition culture. It argues that these events played a pivotal role in the professionalization of horticulture and provided a vital platform for horticulturists, gardeners, and amateurs, including women, to showcase their achievements and contribute to horticulture as a scientific discipline. By contextualizing Portuguese exhibitions within the historiography of international fairs, this study highlights their role in projecting botanical and horticultural progress, particularly in a peripheral European country like Portugal. It demonstrates that exhibitions, beyond promoting artworks as consumer goods, elevated horticultural products to objects of science, art, and culture. This conclusion is upheld by examining horticulture's path towards independence from agricultural exhibitions, as well as the alternating leadership roles of Lisbon and Porto in this field. Additionally, we explore the contribution of the Royal Society of Horticulture in the professionalization of horticulture by fostering competition, knowledge exchange, aesthetic appreciation, and public engagement, while promoting flower exhibitions and enhancing botanical and horticultural knowledge. Ultimately, this article reshapes historiography by positioning horticultural exhibitions as instruments of applied science, public engagement, and urban modernization.
In 1821, the Swedish mycologist Elias Magnus Fries advanced an elaborate classification system of fungi, one that would eventually contribute to his colloquial dubbing as the 'Linnaeus of Mycology'. In its most basic form, Fries's system divided all fungal taxa into precisely four component parts. More fateful, however, was Fries's arrangement of those groups into circles of relationships, just two years after the Scottish entomologist William Sharp Macleay published his provocative 'circular and quinary' system in 1819. The parallel advancement of two circular classification schemes worked to mutually buttress the credibility of each-giving many the appearance of a striking independent discovery. This article examines Fries and Macleay's systems, attending to the questions: How was it that two naturalists, working in entirely different contexts, developed novel circular classification systems within such a short span of time? In what ways did their theories overlap in their claims about the order of nature, and how did they differ? Ultimately, it aims to provide a fresh account of how circular systems-now considered a strange vestige of a troubled period in natural history-emerged so rapidly, and subsequently garnered such dramatic attention and enthusiasm from leading naturalists of the time.
The observations made during the 1919 total solar eclipse by the two British expeditions which observed totality in the city of Sobral in Brazil and in Pr & iacute;ncipe, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea, then part of the Portuguese colonial empire, provided an opportunity to test one of the three astronomical predictions in the general relativity theory put forward by Albert Einstein in 1915: the deflection of light due to the Sun's gravitational field. The Sobral expedition included two astronomers from Greenwich Observatory-Charles Rundle Davidson and Andrew Claude Crommelin; the expedition, which observed in Pr & iacute;ncipe, included the astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington, and the clockmaker and precision time expert Edwin Turner Cottingham. This article will focus on Cottingham, the most overlooked of the four observers. His participation and role in the 1919 expeditions will be addressed in the context of his personal and professional biography. By clarifying Cottingham's role in the expeditions within the context of his career as a reputed precision timekeeping expert, this article highlights the historiographical risk inherent to narratives that aim to bring to light invisible or less regarded actors: they often privilege participation in an epoch-making scientific episode at the expense of casting a shadow on other technical accomplishments.
The Austrian National Library houses a heavily annotated copy of the 1515 printed edition of the Almagest (shelfmark: 80.O.11 Alt Rara), once part of Georg Wilhelm von Hohendorff's (1670-1719) library. The marginalia, including illustrations and diagrams, can be traced to sixteenth-century editions, translations, and commentaries on the Almagest. This article presents the first study of these annotations, highlighting two key aspects: (1) a comparative approach to the Latin editions, constructing a kind of synoptic Almagest, and (2) the reformulation of Ptolemy's procedure for calculating chords into verbally expressed arithmetical rules. Although the annotator remains unidentified, evidence suggests a late sixteenth-century origin. If so, these notes provide a rare glimpse into the early post-Copernican assimilation of the Almagest, offering insights into evolving mathematical practices in early modern astronomy. An Appendix details the main marginalia of the first book and their sources.
This article investigates the dispute about auditory perception in fish that took place in the mid-eighteenth century, when the question of whether fish could hear was heavily debated in academic societies in France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Arguing that this dispute contains key insights into the understanding of animal hearing in eighteenth-century natural history, this article charts the different ways in which how and why early modern naturalists tried to create knowledge about this difficult subject. I discuss the efforts at the Royal Society of London and by individual scholars such as Jean-Antoine Nollet, Jacob Theodor Klein, and Petrus Camper to study underwater hearing by means of anatomy, animal physiology, and acoustic experiments. Although the role of non-human animals in historical notions of hearing has received little attention, this article argues that animals were central to the question of what it means to hear and to the establishment of an eighteenth-century science of hearing.
Francis Galton's Fellowship of the Royal Society spanned the entirety of his eugenic career: he was elected in 1860, five years before he first articulated his eugenic ideas in Macmillan's Magazine. In this article, I trace the various branches of Galton's activity in the Royal Society for the first time, including exhibits he presented at soir & eacute;es, his involvement in the Evolution Committee, and endorsements of candidates for election. In doing so, I establish how, and how far, Galton's eugenics was connected to his activity within the Royal Society. I argue that although his official roles in the Royal Society were not linked to eugenics, Galton's activity elsewhere in the organization provided opportunities for him to share ideas related to his eugenic thought and build his claim that eugenics was scientifically legitimate.
In early modern Britain, tincture possessed several meanings related to colour and pigment. They can be found in various art forms, including dyeing, limning, varnishing, gilding, coloured prints, glass-making, etc. Tincture as both a material and a colour-related concept was also used in medicine, chymistry, alchemy, and literature and became increasingly popular since the mid-seventeenth century. This essay highlights the understanding and use of colour through tincture's versatile applications across disciplines. It centres around three material properties that characterize the making and experience of tincture: tincture's feature of penetrating surface (both material and the human body); the purity of tincture through extraction, which signified material essence and liveness; multisensory experience of tincture through colour, scent, and taste. These aspects suggest the 'sense of volume' of colour, with tincture expressing its flexible, experiential, and elusive qualities.
The beginnings of Western plant pathology were shaped largely by nineteenth-century naturalists' encounters with phytopathological fungi. This reading of Miles Joseph Berkeley's series on 'Vegetable Pathology' in The Gardeners' Chronicle, one of the discipline's founding texts, argues that the fungal epidemics of the 1800s led mycologists to seriously question certain key strategies of transimperial botany, including plantation monoculture, plant transfers, fertilization, and breeding-in short, white humans' ability to control plant processes. Even as Berkeley argued tirelessly that pathogens were involved in disease, he emphasized that plant-pathogenic fungi thrived due to man-made changes in plants and their environments. Equipped with detailed knowledge of the life cycles of fungi and the related diseases, Berkeley argued, botanists would be able to identify the material circumstances favouring fungal development, detailed accounts of which could be found elsewhere in the journal and were frequently referenced in the 'Vegetable Pathology'. Two case studies recontextualize Berkeley's descriptions of individual fungi within the Chronicle's wider coverage, demonstrating the wealth of information available to readers who wished to consider the circumstances of fungal disease, and throwing some light on how the series' uncomfortable suggestions were received by adherents of economic botany.
This collective report details the authors' engagement with the legacies of eugenics through curating exhibitions and events at higher education institutions and museums in the UK and abroad. It details the practical experiences of uncovering and exploring historical eugenic affiliations among influential figures such as Francis Galton and William Beveridge and the challenges faced in addressing these legacies within institutional contexts, specifically University College London (UCL), the London School of Economics (LSE), the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society. The authors, who are also the curators of exhibitions on the history of eugenics, highlight collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches drawing on archival collections, public programming, and responses from epistemic communities engaged with the topic. Rather than being an academic text, this piece reflects on the complex, evolving dialogue around reckoning with eugenics in public history and its relevance today through curatorial practice and collective personal reflection.
We present proposals for two controlled studies of medical treatments published in 1683 by the Anglo-Dutch physician Gideon Harvey (1639-1702). First is a controlled trial of Jesuit's (cinchona) bark with and without bitter additives. Second is a comparison of two 'parallel' towns in Essex, England, where conditions ('air') and disease burden are similar. The latter is the earliest proposal of what today is called a cluster-controlled study, i.e. comparing interventions in two established populations. This methodology only re-emerges in the twentieth century and is key to interventional research in medicine, public health, education, and international development. There is no evidence that Harvey's cluster-controlled trial ever took place. His proposals arose from bitter conflict with London's College of Physicians. Harvey's proposals for 'plain and necessary instructions, rules, and remedies in one single sheet [of paper]' echo Bacon's call for physicians to standardize their erratic treatments. New evidence is examined to reinterpret Harvey's historical legacy solely as a 'prater' and 'quack'. This is most evident in James Lind's 1753 high praise for Harvey's writing on scurvy. We also present new information about Harvey's biography including his 1639 baptism as a 'subject & mldr; of ye King of Great Brittaine resident in the Haghe'.
R. A. Fisher's 1930 book The genetical theory of natural selection has a mixed legacy. Its opening chapters are widely celebrated today for their role in revivifying Darwinism and laying the theoretical foundations of the so-called 'modern synthesis'. Its closing chapters, meanwhile, are notorious. Across more than 100 pages, Fisher provides an extended meditation on eugenics and the decay of civilizations, past and present. The present article asks how this book of 'two halves' came to be. Drawing upon previously unstudied archival evidence, it reconstructs the authorship of this classic scientific text, overturning long-held ideas about the timing and order of the book's composition. In so doing, the article sheds new and urgent light on a decades-long dispute regarding the relationship between Fisher's eugenical commitments and his scientific contributions, at a moment in which his legacies are being actively debated once more.
In the eighteenth century, the interest in conchylia (mollusc shells) grew among naturalists and collectors. These objects, which were attributed to have great beauty, exhibited a high variability, yet many were very rare in Europe. In their attempts to establish taxonomical classifications, conchologists therefore depended on images to a large extent. Examples from the context of the Leopoldina, which served as a network for German conchologists, indicate that the taxonomical use of images led to a change in the understanding of representation from typical to characteristic, that is the naturalistic depiction of carefully selected individuals instead of an ideal image composited from the inspection of multiple objects. The making of these characteristic images required collaborations with increasingly specialized artists. Images were effectively used as substitutes for specimens in working out taxonomic systems, which created a persistent need for more images among conchologists. In addition to extensive cross-references between images and synonyms, conchologists incorporated references to specific collections in their descriptions of shells to indicate the models used for the images and the characteristic mode of representation.
