IT has always seemed to me that the kind of preface in which an author pays off debts and disarms criticism ought to come at the end of a book, after he has done his work and run the risks for which he begs indulgence. This book is no attempt to recount in summary the whole history of science from Galileo to Maxwell and Mendel. Instead, its purpose is to set out in narrative form what I take to be the structure in the history of classical science. This I find in the route which the advancing edge of objectivity has in fact taken through the study of nature from one science to another. History is made by men, not by causes or forces, and I have tried to write with due attention to the intellectual personalities who have borne the battle, and not without sympathy for its casualties. And though I have written as closely to the texts as my competence permits, I want the tale to move unencumbered by the barnacles of scholarly apparatus. There are liberal quotations from the great literature of past science, but they are included to convey its style and spirit, and not to establish this or that point of fact. I hope that this book will help win for history of science a place in historiography comparable in interest and professionalism to that which the philosophy of science has for long held in philosophy. But history is critical narrative, and considering the range of this one, whatever effect it may have will depend on the interpretation and the vision of the subject.
The account does not rest on obscure or little known sources. With very few exceptions, and those quite insignificant, the memoirs and treatises I cite are well known to specialists, and so too will be many of the passages quoted. All are identified in the text, and the editions used are those mentioned below in the bibliography. In every case the editions are standard collections of the works, letters, and lives of the scientists concerned, or of the relevant societies, all to be found readily in large libraries. Where a suitable English translation exists, I have adopted it. Otherwise I have made my own. But except where critical editions are standard or contribute to the interpretation of a subject, I have not listed bibliographical detail on all the books discussed. It seems absurd, for example, to itemize the editions of the Principia or the Origin of Species. That information will be well known to specialists, and easily available to others in card catalogues.
I do not wish to be so cavalier about the scholars, my contemporaries and colleagues, upon whose studies I have freely drawn. The references which follow do not exhaust the literature on the subject of any chapter or section. I have tried to keep to a minimum, while including everything which I have used directly and consciously, together with the most important articles and monographs of recent years. In every case these will lead the reader into the older literature should he wish to pursue some subject. In the case of Chapter Six, for example, on the chemical revolution, the writings of M. Daumas and Professor Guerlac, which I do cite, will inform the reader about the monographs of A. N. Meldrum and Hélène Metzger, which I do not.
Beyond this, or rather before it, there are certain persons who have shaped my views fundamentally, or to whom I wish to express special thanks. First is my wife, whose sympathetic and critical eye for detail and for style never fails to improve my publications. Whatever my scholarship is, it would be far less without her help and devotion. My editor, John Boles, of the Princeton University Press, has been a tower of strength and a model of patience. I am immensely indebted to two fellow historians of science, Professor Marshall Clagett of the University of Wisconsin and Professor I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University, who read the first nine chapters. Dr. Alistair C. Crombie of Oxford University gave helpful criticism of Chapter Eight. Chapters Seven and Eight have both benefited from discussion of the argument with Professor Colin S. Pittendrigh of the Department of Biology in Princeton University. My colleague in the Department of Physics, Professor George Reynolds, also took time from his laboratory to read Chapter Nine and to discuss Chapter Ten. Finally, Professor George Temple of Oxford University gave me his opinion of Chapter Eleven. All have saved me solecisms over which I blush (though not so hotly as if they had got into print), and no one of these guardian angels is responsible for any which remain.
That Professors Clagett and Cohen have dedicated their own major works to Alexandre Koyré of the Ecole pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, will not prevent me from saying that I, too, owe more to him professionally than to anyone else. His writings have revealed to me wherein the intellectual content of the history of science consists. His is by far the greatest influence on this book, and if I make bold to differ here and there—in the remarks I venture in his own domain on Newton and the aether, or on Darwin and the nineteenth-century sense of process, or in attributing more in general to personality and less to philosophy—it is with a feeling of some daring. He is the master of us all.
I should also like to pay special tribute to Professor Giorgio de Santillana of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not only have I adopted his Galileo for my first chapter, but his writings have done more than I realized until I came to write this book to shape my views on the relations of science, history, and culture in general. Two recent books on the philosophy of science are very encouraging in their sympathetic treatment of its history. Professor Gustav Bergmann of the State University of Iowa once had the kindness to comment on a paper I had given that it exemplified the structural history of ideas. I went home to his book, Philosophy of Science (Madison, 1957), to find out what I was doing, and learned that structural history of thought is, indeed, what I try to write. I mean a narrative which accepts the difference between the logical order and the historical order, and seeks to discern a structure in the latter inhering in the relation of philosophy, technicality, personality, and circumstance. Secondly, N. R. Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958) exemplifies what it would be excellent for the philosophy of science to do: address itself critically to science as inquiry, not just logically or verbally to science as system, and treat current science as continuous with its history, thus illuminating and drawing on the history of science.
Finally, I have profited from the researches of certain of my undergraduate students in Princeton University to whom I owe a debt of gratitude going beyond the general pleasure I have drawn from them all: to Cornelius C. Bond, ’56, for his paper on Maxwell; to Gordon Hammes, ’56, for his paper on Joule; to LeRoy Riddick, Jr., ’58, for his senior thesis on John Wilkins; to Arthur M. Jaffe, ’59, for his paper comparing Gibbs and Duhem in their philosophies of science; and to Charles Thornton Murphy, ’59, for his paper on the field concept in nineteenth-century physics.
I take license from the example of Lavoisier for attempting to influence the conception of a whole discipline by writing an elementary and educational treatise, weaving together the researches of others with a generalization of certain specialized studies of my own. The interpretations of the first four chapters are adapted for the most part from the work of others, with certain exceptions, of which the most important are my reserve about Pascal, the analysis of Harvey, my response to Bacon, the emphasis on Boyle as an atomic physicist rather than a chemist, and the discussions in the Newton chapter of the discreteness of light consisting in rays, not particles, and of the relation of the aether to his personal problem in communication and intelligibility. The remaining chapters owe much substance to the scholars cited in the bibliography. Nevertheless, the conception of them is my own, as far as I know. I set this out less to claim credits than to permit the reader to judge what authority attaches to the interpretations.
This book originated in a commission from the D. Van Nostrand Company. I lacked the skill to work within the compass we had contemplated, and I should like to acknowledge the kindness and courtesy with which they released me from my contract and allowed me to publish with our University Press. Other publishers and proprietors of journals have very generously allowed me to reprint passages which have previously appeared under their copyright in writings of mine mentioned in the bibliography. I am most grateful to Harvard University Press, The Johns Hopkins University Press, The University of Wisconsin Press, Dover Publications, American Scientist, Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, Behavioral Science, Isis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Revue d’histoire des sciences, and Victorian Studies. The American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Princeton University have supported studies and leaves which made it possible for me to write this book, and indeed to become a historian of science in the first place.
Of the many writers on Greek science, S. Sambursky (The Physical World of the Greeks, London, 1956) concerns himself more immediately than any other with the parentage of modern science in Greece. For his influence on my own views, see my review article, “A Physicist Looks at Greek Science” (American Scientist, 46: 62-74, 1958). His perspective is that of a physicist as well as a classical scholar, and it might be well to set it off against Marshall Clagett’s Greek Science in Antiquity (New York, 1956), and A Source Book in Greek Science (edited by Morris R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, 2nd ed., New York, 1959). A. C. Crombie’s Medieval and Modern Science (2 vols., New York, 1959) has quickly established itself as the standard history of medieval science, which Dr. Crombie regards as more continuous with modern science than my own omission of that subject would suggest. In any case, a massive and magisterial monograph by Marshall Clagett (The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, Madison, Wis., 1959) is indispensable reading for all students of the history of science, and particularly for the medieval background of Galilean kinematics. A classic article by J. H. Randall, “The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua (Journal of the History of Ideas, 1: 177-206, 1940) should be consulted for the positive Aristotelian element in the scientific revolution. The most comprehensive recent work on Copernicus is by Thomas S. Kuhn: The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). Kuhn treats his subject as a case study in the formation of concepts. The chapter on Copernicus and his conservatism may be the best of many fine features in Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science (London, 1949), which little book did more than any other to win the history of science a place in contemporary historiography. A new edition of Edward Rosen’s Three Copernican Treatises (New York, 1939) is in preparation. There is, finally, considerable emphasis on the archaism of Copernicus in Derek J. de Solla Price’s “Contra-Copernicus: A Critical Re-estimate of the Mathematical Planetary Theory of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler” (Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett, Madison, Wis., 1959).
For the history of cosmology in general and of Kepler in particular, it is still useful to consult J. L. E. Dreyer’s A History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler (Cambridge, 1905; re-issued, New York, 1953). Though my own interpretation of the history of science is diametrically the opposite of Arthur Koestler’s, there is much to be learned from his account of Kepler and his astronomy, which seems to me the best part of The Sleepwalkers (New York, 1959). Two recent discussions treat Kepler as a study in the formation of theory: Gerald Holton’s “Johannes Kepler’s Universe, its Physics and Metaphysics” (American Journal of Physics, 24: 340-351, 1956); and Chapter IV of N. R. Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958). Alexandre Koyré begins with Kepler’s celestial mechanics in “La gravitation universelle de Kepler a Newton” (Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 4: 638-653, 1951). Brief excerpts from the correspondence are translated in Carola Baumgardt’s Johannes Kepler: Life and Letters (London, 1952); and there is an excellent biography by Max Caspar, Johannes Kepler (Stuttgart, 1948), who is editing Kepler’s Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1937-).
The indispensable starting point for the study, not only of Galileo but of the entire scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, is Alexandre Koyré’s Etudes galiléennes (3 parts, Paris, 1939). In The Crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955), Giorgio de Santillana has written a study of Galileo’s difficulties with the Church and of the intellectual personality which entailed those troubles. Santillana also edited Thomas Salusbury’s translation of the Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World (Chicago, 1953), to which I am indebted for my quotations from that work. A complementary edition in modern translation is by Stillman Drake, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953). Drake has translated a number of other writings under the title, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York, 1957); and I owe to him the anecdote about Galileo on wine, “Galileo Gleanings I” (Isis, 48: 393-397, 1957). The only translation of the Discorsi is Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (New York, 1914) by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, and it is less than satisfactory, though it did win the approval of the great Galileo scholar, Antonio Favaro, editor of the Edizione nazionale of the Opere (20 vols., Florence, 1890-1909).
CHAPTERS II AND III
Since these two chapters deal with science as a movement of thought between Galileo and Newton, it seems best to group relevant writings in a single section. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York, 1955) have been translated and collected by Edward MacCurdy, and Leonardo’s technical drawings appear in the immense folio Leonardo da Vinci published in New York by Reynal, and copyrighted in Italy in 1956 by the Istituto Geografico de Agostini (Novara). The most important critical essays on Leonardo and science are in Léonard de Vinci et l’expérience scientifique au XVI siècle (Paris, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1952). My own interpretation of Vesalius has been shaped by an excellent discussion of De fabrica in A. R. Hall’s The Scientific Revolution (London, 1954). The ensuing succession of physiological discoveries appears in very clear relief in the selections translated in Henry Guerlac’s Selected Readings in the History of Science (multigraph, Ithaca, 1950, Vol. I, fascicule 3). Sir Michael Foster’s Lectures on the History of Physiology (Cambridge, 1901) give an account of the pre-Harveian doctrine on circulation. Kenneth V. Franklin’s new translation of Harvey (On The Motion of The Heart, Oxford, 1957), is as superb in its fidelity as in its felicity, and Blackwell’s has graced the work in a beautiful edition. Students of Harvey are fortunate in the translation of De Motu Locali Animalium (Cambridge, 1959) by Gweneth Whitteridge, and in Bibliography of the Writings of Dr. William Harvey (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1953), by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Keynes’s scholarship and admiration for Harvey nowhere appear to better advantage than in the charming vignette, The Personality of William Harvey (Cambridge, 1949). The most recent biography, finally, is by Louis Chauvois (William Harvey, trans, from the French, New York, 1957), whose slight tendency to hero-worship is a most sympathetic defect of the qualities of a lifelong enthusiasm. Richard Foster Jones has made a useful selection from the vast corpus of Bacon in Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis, and other Pieces (1937). His introduction is an excellent essay in itself. It might be well, moreover, to balance my rather critical estimate of Bacon with Benjamin Farrington’s Francis Bacon (New York, 1949).
There is a very sensitive discussion of the Discourse on Method in Alexandre Koyré’s Entretiens sur Descartes (New York and Paris, 1944). Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957) develops in full the implications of infinity for the problem of man and nature, while the third fascicule of his Etudes galiléennes studies Descartes and inertia. In addition there is an excellent account of this, as of Cartesian mechanics in general, in René Dugas’ La Mécanique au XVIIe Siècle (Neuchâtel, 1954), and of the later physics of the Cartesian school in Paul Mouy’s Le développement de la physique cartésienne, 1646-1712 (Paris, 1934). Vasco Ronchi’s Storia della luce (Bologna, 1939) is an authoritative history of optics. A French translation by Juliette Taton appeared in 1956. The critical edition of the Oeuvres de Descartes (13 vols., Paris, 1897-1913) was edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, and is indispensable for any serious study.
The “Penguin Classics” contain a very workable translation of Lucretius by R. E. Latham (London, 1951) under the title The Nature of the Universe, and there is a fine discussion of ancient atomism in Sambursky’s The Physical World of the Greeks. Robert Lenoble’s Mersenne, ou la naissance du mécanisme (Paris, 1943) gives an account of the adoption of atomism in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Papers contributed to a colloquium on Gassendi have appeared in Pierre Gassendi, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, Centre international de synthèse, 1955). Blaise Pascal, l’homme et l’oeuvre (Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie No. 1, Paris, 1956), edited by M. A. Bera, owes its origin to a similar occasion. I. H. B. and A. G. H. Spiers translated and edited The Physical Treatises of Pascal (New York, 1937), including a small selection of correspondence. James B. Conant opens Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science (2 vols., Cambridge, 1957) with an account of Boyle’s experiments on pneumatics. The place to begin a study of Boyle, however, is with the life prefixed by Thomas Birch to his edition of The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (5 vol., London, 1744). John Fulton’s A Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle (Oxford, 1933; Suppl. 1949) is a classic work of bibliophilia. Marie Boas treats Boyle as a mechanistic thinker in “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy” (Osiris, 10: 412-541, 1952), and she has recently published a more general study, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge, 1958).
Sprat’s History of the Royal Society has been printed in a modern edition edited by J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St. Louis, 1958). A pioneer monograph in the institutional history of science still outshines many recent writings: Martha Ornstein’s The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1928). Alfred Maury’s L’ancienne Académie des sciences (Paris, 1864) is a semi-official and rather uncritical work, and one does better, perhaps, to turn to the historical introductions which Fontenelle prefixed to the Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences depuis 1666 jusqu’à 1699. The most recent history of the Royal Society is Dorothy Stimson’s Scientists and Amateurs (New York, 1948). A standard (and superb) monograph on the sociology of the scientific movement in England is Robert K. Merton’s Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (Volume IV, Part 2 of Osiris Studies, Bruges, 1938). Merton may and should be supplemented by Basic Willey’s The Seventeenth-Century Background (London, 1953); Richard Foster Jones’ Ancients and Moderns (Saint Louis, 1936); and G. N. Clark’s Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (2nd ed., Oxford, 1949); and compared to R. H. Knapp and B. H. Goodrich’s Origins of American Scientists (Chicago, 1952).
CHAPTER IV
The long and eagerly awaited publication by the Royal Society of The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (edited by H. W. Turnbull, Cambridge, 1959) has begun to appear. This chapter was in page proof before the first volume arrived, and readers may compare the interpretation to the record of Newton’s letters as far as 1675. My account of the optics rests upon the documents introduced by Thomas S. Kuhn in I. Bernard Cohen’s edition of Isaac Newton’s Letters and Papers on Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), which gathers the writings Newton published on physics, other than the Principia and the Optics. A facsimile reproduction of the first edition of the former was published by William Dawson & Sons (London, 1957), and of the latter by Dover (New York, 1952) with an introduction by I. B. Cohen. Professor Cohen’s Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia, The American Philosophical Society, 1956) is the most comprehensive work on Newton yet to appear, and it will surely serve as the point of departure for future scholarship, even as to bibliography. Its thoroughness in the latter respect makes superfluous the mention here of any but the most important essays in interpretation. Of these the foremost are (once again) by Alexandre Koyré: “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis” (Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 11: 291-311, 1950); “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton” (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45: 329-395, 1955); and “L’hypothèse et l’expérience chez Newton” (Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 59-97, avril-juin, 1956). Other important articles dealing with Newton and scientific explanation are A. C. Crombie’s “Newton’s Conception of Scientific Method” (Bulletin of the Institute of Physics, 350-362, Nov. 1957), and Stephen Toulmin’s “Criticism in the History of Science: Newton on Absolute Space, Time and Motion” (The Philosophical Review, 68: 1-29 and 203-227, 1959). W. W. Rouse Ball’s An Essay on Newton’s Principia (London, 1893) gives an extremely useful synopsis of the great book. Finally, H. G. Alexander introduces The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (New York, 1956) with a discerning summary of the philosophical points at issue between Leibniz and Newton.
The argument of this chapter differs somewhat from other interpretations of the influence of science in the Enlightenment. I hope it will not be unseemly to mention some of the special studies which led me to it. They may serve to document the discussion, and I have adopted certain passages therefrom for the present work. I first became impressed with the current of eighteenth-century hostility to Newtonian science in researches for a social and intellectual history of science in the French Revolution, a work which is still in progress. An essay on “The Formation of Lamarck’s Evolutionary Theory” (Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 323-338, Octobre-Décembre 1956) broached what now seems to me an example of romanticism in natural history. Another essay, “The Encyclopédie and the Jacobin Philosophy of Science,” appeared in the symposium Critical Problems in the History of Science (edited by Marshall Clagett, Madison, Wis., 1959). It treats of the attack upon the Académie des sciences as a political instance of the attempt to substitute popular and organismic for abstract and mathematical science. The complementary story, the movement toward rationalizing science in institutions after Thermidor, is the subject of “Science and the French Revolution” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 45: 677-689, 1959). My attention was led back to Diderot and technological Baconianism by research for an edition of A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry: Manufacturing and the Technical Arts in Plates from l’Encyclopédie (2 vols., New York, 1959). Two articles, finally, deal with the relations of science and industry in the Enlightenment: “The Discovery of the Leblanc Process” and “The Natural History of Industry” (Isis, 48: 152-170 and 398-407, 1957).
The most suggestive work for the positivistic tenor of scientific philosophy in the Enlightenment is Henri Gouhier’s La jeunesse de Comte et la naissance du positivisme (3 vols., Paris, 1933-1941). Isaiah Berlin’s The Age of Enlightenment (New York and Boston, 1956) serves to introduce Locke and the theory of ideas. It seems to me that the Voltaire of Peter Gay’s stimulating Voltaire’s Politics (Princeton, 1959) is congruent with the intellectual personality that I see in his Newtonianism. In any case, volumes 2 through 11 of Voltaire’s Correspondence (edited by Theodore Besterman, Geneva, 1953-) contain expressions of his state of mind about physics during the 1730’s. The Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac (3 vols., Paris, 1947-51) have been edited with a brief critical and biographical introduction by Georges Le Roy for the series Corpus général des philosophes français. Condorcet’s Esquisse has been given a fortunate translation by June Barraclough as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (London, 1955). And Diderot, for his part, is the subject of an excellent biography by Arthur Wilson (Diderot, the Testing Years, New York, 1957), of which a second volume is to appear. Convenient editions of Diderot’s writings appear as Oeuvres philosophiques (edited by Paul Vernière, Paris, 1956) and Oeuvres romanesques (edited by Henri Bénac, Paris, 1951). Of recent writings on the Enlightenment, the most suggestive seems to me to be Aram Vartanian’s Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1953). I no longer agree with the thesis, which makes Descartes the fountainhead of eighteenth-century scientism. The argument requires overlooking the route from associationist psychology through Condillac’s philosophy to positivism, by which Newtonian science was brought to bear on the human condition. Nevertheless, I do agree with much of Vartanian’s criticism of the conventional historiography of ideas in the Enlightenment, and with his emphasis on a Cartesian strain running through the period.
As to Goethe, I feel a certain temerity, and I venture the interpretation only in the profound conviction that this reading of his science as anti-science makes sense. One may draw immense profit from books with which one profoundly disagrees, and no one (it seems to me) has so well understood the import of Goethe’s science as a contemporary disciple, Ernst Lehrs, from whom I differ only in the ultimate judgment of the value of Goethe’s science and not in its interpretation. I am much indebted to his Man or Matter; Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Matter Based on Goethe’s Method of Training, Observation, and Thought (London, 1951). Among the immense Goethe literature, mention may also be made of René Berthelot’s Science et philosophie chez Goethe (Paris, 1932), René Michéa’s Les travaux scientifiques de Goethe (Paris, 1943), Martin Loesche’s Grundbegriffe in Goethes Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1944), and Marianne Trapp’s Goethes naturphilosophische Denkweise (Stuttgart, 1949). The most convenient source for Goethe’s writings on science is the Weimar edition, and the principal works with dates of composition are Dem Menschen wie den Thieren ist ein Zwischenknochen der obern Kinnlade zuzuschreiben (1784); Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790); Beitrage zur Optik (1791-92); Zur Farbenlehre (1810-1823).
The work to which I allude on conservatism is R. J. White’s The Conservative Tradition (London, 1950).
CHAPTER VI
The two foremost authorities on Lavoisier and the chemical revolution are Maurice Daumas and Henry Guerlac, to whose writings I am much indebted. Daumas summarized his researches to date in Lavoisier, théoricien et expérimentateur (Paris, 1955); and Guerlac is gathering into a book (which will be eagerly awaited) his series of articles, of which the most important are: “The Continental Reputation of Stephen Hales” (Archives internationale d’histoire des sciences, 4: 393-404, 1951); “Joseph Priestley’s First Papers on Gases and their Reception in France” (Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 12: 1-12, 1957); “A Note on Lavoisier’s Scientific Education” (Isis, 47: 211-216, 1956); “Joseph Black and Fixed Air” (Isis, 48: 124-151, 433-456, 1957); “Some French Antecedents of the Chemical Revolution” (Chymia, 73-112, 1959); “A Lost Memoir of Lavoisier” (Isis, 50: 125-129, 1959).
Mme. Lavoisier’s account of Lavoisier’s day comes from an article of my own, “Notice biographique de Lavoisier par Mme. Lavoisier” (Revue d’histoire des sciences, 9: 52-61, 1956). The interpretation of Lavoisier as a theorist is also mine, at least insofar as concerns the argument for the theoretical respectability of caloric and the attribution to Condillacian method of Lavoisier’s over-extension of oxygen and his failure to reduce his concepts to atomism. The thesis was developed for presentation before the “Colloque international sur l’histoire de la chimie au XVIIIe siècle” held in Paris on 11, 12, and 13 September 1959, under the auspices of the Comité national français d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. It is expected that the proceedings of that colloquium will be published.
An article by Uno Boklund advances the claims for Scheele’s priority in the discovery of oxygen: “A Lost Letter from Scheele to Lavoisier” (Lychnos, 1-27, 1957). The history of Priestley’s experimental discoveries and their relation to Lavoisier’s conceptual thinking forms the subject of one of James B. Conant’s case studies, “The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory” (Harvard Case Studies, I, 65-116). The same volume contains Leonard K. Nash’s “The Atomic-Molecular Theory” (215-321), of which he modifies the argument while further emphasizing the physical quality of Dalton’s thinking in “The Origin of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory” (Isis, 47: 101-116, 1956).
Joseph Black’s Experiments upon Magnesia Alba (1756) was reprinted by the Alembic Club (Edinburgh, 1898), and The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish (2 volumes, Cambridge, 1921) were edited by James Clerk Maxwell and Sir Edward Thorpe. Joseph Priestley published his work in Experiments and Observations upon Different Kinds of Air (3 vols., London, 1774-1777), and Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy (3 vols., London, 1779-1785). The French Ministry of Education published the Oeuvres de Lavoisier, vols. I-IV (1864-1868) edited by J. B. Dumas; and volumes V-VI (1892-1894) edited by Edouard Grimaux. Two volumes have appeared of the Correspondance de Lavoisier (edited by René Fric, Paris, 1955-). And finally, Dalton’s New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808) is available in a facsimile reprint (2 vols., London, 1953).
CHAPTERS VII AND VIII
It will be best to handle the literature on nineteenth-century biology in a single section. The treatment of Lamarck and certain passages in the discussion of Darwin are drawn from two essays of my own: “The Formation of Lamarck’s Evolutionary Theory” (Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 9: 323-338, 1956); and “Lamarck and Darwin in the History of Science” (Forerunners of Darwin, edited by Bentley Glass, Baltimore, 1959); whereas the treatment of geology is condensed from my book, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge, Mass., 1951). By far the two best histories of evolutionary thought are Paul Ostoya’s Les théories de l’évolution (Paris, 1951), and Loren C. Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century (New York, 1958). There is an excellent history of the taxonomic foundations of nineteenth-century biology which does not seem to have been much noticed by historians of science—Henri Daudin’s Cuvier et Lamarck: Les classes zoologiques et l’idée de série animale, 1790-1830 (2 vols., Paris, 1926). The remark about Cuvier’s first utterance is quoted from (Mrs.) R. Lee’s Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (New York, 1833). Eiseley has also published a very important paper, “Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the Theory of Natural Selection” (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 103: 94-158, 1959). He adduces evidence that Darwin adopted the theory without proper acknowledgment from the writings of the naturalist Blyth. The essay appeared too late to affect my own treatment, but I am not persuaded that Darwin suffers seriously from it—a discussion might turn on the difference between an idea (in Blyth) and a theory (in Darwin). Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and The Darwinian Revolution (New York, 1959) denigrates Darwin and his work. The book is fuller biographically than any other. But the author’s attitude to science and its history is like that of Arthur Koestler, and bespeaks the same offense which objective science and its founders seem to give the literary temperament, or at least the temperament which would merge psychologically into nature. Another, and a more widely acclaimed book, William Irvine’s Apes, Angels, and Victorians (New York, 1955), treats the founders of evolutionary science as figures of fun.
The most useful book in the spate loosed by the centennial year is Nora Barlow’s edition of her grandfather’s Autobiography (London, 1959) which restores the passages omitted from the first publication in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (edited by Francis Darwin, 3 vols., London, 1888), and contains additional material on Samuel Butler and Darwin. Students will find convenient the selections and arrangement in The Darwin Reader (edited by Marston Bates and Philip S. Humphrey, New York, 1956), and a republication of the original Darwin and Wallace papers, Evolution by Natural Selection (with a foreword by Sir Gavin de Beer, Cambridge, 1958). David Lack’s Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief (London, 1957) is an admirably temperate statement of a view that it does not, however, seem necessary to me to hold—i.e. that there is a real conflict.
Major treatises relevant to the history of late nineteenth-century evolutionism have been translated: Hugo Iltis’ Life of Mendel (trans. by Eden and Cedar Paul, London, 1932); Mendel’s own original paper, Experiments in Plant Hybridization (edited by William Bateson, Cambridge, Mass., 1948); Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (New York, 1901); The History of Creation (London, 1876); The Evolution of Man (New York, 1892); August Weismann’s Essays upon Heredity (2nd ed., 2 vols., Oxford, 1891-1892); and The Germ-Plasm (New York, 1893). Karl Wilhelm Nägeli’s Mechanischphysiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre (Munich, 1884) does not seem to have been Englished, but there is an abstract of the argument, A Mechanico-Physiological Theory of Organic Evolution (Chicago, 1898), trans. by V. A. Clark. Erik Nordenskjold’s The History of Biology (New York, 1928) must still serve as the best general history of the science.
CHAPTER IX
The foremost essay on the history of thermodynamics is Thomas S. Kuhn’s “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery” (Critical Problems in the History of Science). Professor Kuhn employs rather a taxonomic than an evolutionary approach to establishing the filiation of ideas, and his treatment is informed by a thorough mastery of the issues. A most suggestive book, one which is too little known, is particularly valuable in relating the work of Clausius to that of Carnot: Charles Brunold’s L’Entropie, son role dans le développement historique de la thermodynamique (Paris, 1930). Throughout the whole discussion, I have found invaluable P. W. Bridgman’s The Nature of Thermodynamics (Cambridge, Mass., 1941). Gerald Holton’s Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science (Cambridge, 1952) is a textbook which makes liberal and intelligent use of historical materials. The older literature includes important positivist contributions: Ernst Mach’s Die Prinzipien der Wärmelehre, historisch-kritisch entwickelt (Leipzig, 1923); Pierre Duhem’s L’évolution de la mécanique (Paris, 1905), which is historical in purpose; and (more important) Duhem’s Traité d’énergetique (2 volumes, Paris, 1911). Though of more recent date, Ernst Cassirer’s The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven, 1950) seems immensely more remote because of its metaphysical approach. Nevertheless, Cassirer understood (perhaps because he approved of) the tenets of Mayer’s energeticism better than other commentators. As for the original papers, Sadi Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (1824) was re-issued in Paris in 1878. Translations of Carnot, together with memoirs by Clausius and Thomson, are printed in The Second Law of Thermodynamics (New York, 1899) edited by W. F. Magie. A general treatise of Clausius has also been put into English: The Mechanical Theory of Heat (trans. by Walter Browne, London, 1879). Joule’s experiments are gathered without benefit of serious editorial attention into two volumes, The Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule (London, 1884-87). H. Helmholtz’s Über die Erhaltung der Kraft became the first of Ostwalds Klassiker (Leipzig, 1889). Mayer’s two basic papers followed under the somewhat inappropriate title Die Mechanik der Wärme (Leipzig, 1911). There is an interesting edition of Mayer’s correspondence Robert von Mayer über die Erhaltung der Energie, edited by W. Preyer (Berlin, 1889). Finally, one wonders when the historiography of science will surpass that monument of nineteenth-century scholarship, John Theodore Merz’s A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1896-1914).
CHAPTERS X AND XI
Ronchi’s Storia della luce remains a helpful guide in following the transition from the particle to the wave theory of light. The quotations of Young’s correspondence are from Frank Oldham and Alexander Wood’s Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher, 1773-1829 (Cambridge, 1954). Young summarized his earlier papers in the optical sections of A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy (2 vols.; London, 1807), which work provides (incidentally) an excellent conspectus of the state of physics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A lecture by Louis de Broglie interprets the work of Fresnel in “La physique moderne et l’oeuvre de Fresnel” (Recueil d’exposés sur les ondes et les corpuscles, Paris, 1930). Emile Verdet’s introduction to the Oeuvres d’Augustin Fresnel (3 volumes, Paris, 1866-1869) is discursive but, by the same token, very full and informative. Passages from Fresnel are translated from this collection. Ernst Mach is always to be read with profit: The Principles of Physical Optics (trans. by John S. Anderson and A. F. A. Young, London, 1926). No book bears so directly on the subject of this whole chapter as E. T. Whittaker’s History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (2 volumes; London, 1951-1953). Nevertheless, Whittaker must be used with a certain caution, for he expresses the physics of the nineteenth century in the formalism of the twentieth, and he arranges his materials in accord with their relations in the modern order of physics rather than in the order of history and discovery.
Everyone should begin the study of Faraday with John Tyndall’s Faraday as a Discoverer (London, 1868), a charming memoir and a standing rebuke to Strachey’s strictures on Victorian biography. Two articles by Robert C. Stauffer deal with the beginnings of electromagnetic science: “Persistent Errors Regarding Oersted’s Discovery” (Isis, 44: 307-310, 1953) and “Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism” (Isis, 48: 33-50, 1957). Thomas Martin, the editor of Faraday’s Diaries, has a meticulous little study, Faraday’s Discovery of Electro-Magnetic Induction (London, 1949). And there are a number of editions of Faraday’s collected papers, Experimental Researches in Electricity, of which the most recent is in the Chicago “Great Books” collections, volume 45 (Chicago, 1952), together with Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry.
The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell were edited in two volumes by W. D. Niven (Cambridge, 1890) and reprinted in a photographic edition by Hermann (Paris, 1927). All my quotations from Maxwell are drawn from the papers contained therein. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett’s The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London, 1882) is a full-scale but uncritical biography. More helpful, really, is James Clerk Maxwell, a Commemoration Volume, 1831-1931 (Cambridge, 1931), containing essays by J. J. Thomson, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, James Jeans, et al. The positivists are worth reading as always; but Pierre Duhem’s Les théories électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell (Paris, 1902) seems to me in less happy vein than other of his writings.
The epilogue to the present book does not purport to be history of science proper. It is rather commentary upon the reading of Pierre Duhem’s The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (trans. by Philip P. Wiener, Princeton, 1954); and L’évolution de la mécanique; Wilhelm Ostwald’s Die Energie (Leipzig, 1908); Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (trans. by T. J. McCormack, 2nd ed., Chicago, 1902); C. B. Weinberg’s Mach’s Empirio-Pragmatism in Physical Science (New York, 1937); H. A. Lorentz, Impressions of His Life and Work (edited by G. L. de Haas-Lorentz, Amsterdam, 1957); Cornelius Lanczos’ “Albert Einstein and the Role of Theory in Contemporary Physics” (American Scientist, 47: 41-59, 1959); Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld’s The Evolution of Physics (New York, 1938); Albert Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity (5th edition, Princeton, 1955); and the various contributions, especially Einstein’s own, to Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist (edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, New York, 1951), from which the quotations of Einstein’s words are made.