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This book provides a fascinating insight into the life and scientific work of Laura Bassi, the first female member of the influential Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna and also the first woman to be appointed a university professor in physics, or universal philosophy as it was then termed. The book describes Laura Bassi's research activities and achievements, explaining the influence of Newton, her role in promoting Newtonian experimental physics in Bologna, and her work as an experimentalist, including on electricity. Much attention is paid to the context in which Bassi developed her career. The very considerable difficulties faced by a woman surrounded by male university teachers and members of the Academy are discussed, casting light on the constraints that led Bassi to set up the first experimental physics laboratory in her home, complete with the many instruments required for experimentation and private teaching. The aim is to provide a rounded and well-documentedaccount of the scientific endeavors and achievements of a too often overlooked scientist who struggled to overcome the prejudices of her age.

Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history of knowledge. By conceptualizing locations of knowing as time-specific configurations of actors, artefacts, and activities, contributors to this volume not only examine cities as specific kind of locations, but also analyze the regionally and globally networked and transformative character of locations. Many of the locations which are studied in this volume are still visible until the present day. Contributors are Azadeh Achbari, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Alette Fleischer, Floor Haalboom, Marijn Hollestelle, Dirk van Miert, Ilja Nieuwland, Abel Streefland, Andreas Weber, Martin Weiss, Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, and Huib Zuidervaart.

Before Romantic genius, there was ingenuity. Early modern ingenuity defined every person—not just exceptional individuals—as having their own attributes and talents, stemming from an “inborn nature” that included many qualities, not just intelligence. Through ingenuity and its family of related terms, early moderns sought to understand and appreciate differences between peoples, places, and things in an attempt to classify their ingenuities and assign professions that were best suited to one's abilities. Logodaedalus, a prehistory of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, and Dutch—the authors reveal the ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics, and artistic theory.

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how Sir Isaac Newton's Principia was read, interpreted and remodelled for a variety of readerships in eighteenth-century Europe. The editors, Mordechai Feingold and Elizabethanne Boran, have brought together papers which explore how, when, where and why the Principia was appropriated by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. Particular focus is laid on the methods of transmission of Newtonian ideas via university textbooks and popular works written for educated laymen and women. At the same time, challenges to the Newtonian consensus are explored by writers such as Marius Stan and Catherine Abou-Nemeh who examine Cartesian and Leibnizian responses to the Principia. Eighteenth-century attempts to remodel Newton as a heretic are explored by Feingold, while William R. Newman draws attention to vital new sources highlighting the importance of alchemy to Newton. Contributors are: Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Claudia Addabbo, Elizabethanne Boran, Steffen Ducheyne, Moredechai Feingold, Sarah Hutton, Juan Navarro-Loidi, William R. Newman, Luc Peterschmitt, Anna Marie Roos, Marius Stan, and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt.

Anne Troelstra's fine bibliography is an outstanding and ground-breaking work. He has provided the academic world with a long-needed bibliographical record of human endeavour in the field of the natural sciences.The travel narratives listed here encompass all aspects of the natural world in every part of the globe, but are especially concerned with its fauna, flora and fossil remains. Such eyewitness accounts have always fascinated their readers, but they were never written solely for entertainment: fragmentary though they often are, these narratives of travel and exploration are of immense importance for our scientific understanding of life on earth, providing us with a window on an ever changing, and often vanishing, natural world. Without such records of the past we could not track, document or understand the significance of changes that are so important for the study of zoogeography.With this book Troelstra gives us a superb overview of natural history travel narratives. The well over four thousand detailed entries, ranging over four centuries and all major western European languages, are drawn from a wide range of sources and include both printed books and periodical contributions. While no subject bibliography by a single author can attain absolute completeness, Troelstra's work is comprehensive to a truly remarkable degree.The entries are arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically, by the year of first publication, under the author's name. A brief biography, with the scope and range of their work, is given for each author; every title is set in context, the contents – including illustrations – are described and all known editions and translations are cited. In addition, there is a geographical index that cross refers between authors and the regions visited, and a full list of the bibliographical and biographical sources used in compiling the bibliography.

The volume provides an archive of some of the most beautiful illustrations ever made of the gravid uterus with fetus and placenta, which will serve future generations of investigators, educators, and students of reproduction. The approximately two hundred figures from over one hundred volumes included are from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century. For each author whose work is depicted in this volume, we have used the first edition or first illustrated edition. In the commentary, each volume and illustration is placed in its historical perspective, noting both the significance of that image, but also some background on the life and work of the author. For most of the works cited, there are additional references for the reader who may wish to explore these in greater depth. This volume is a unique collection not only of these historical images, but also their place in the development of scientific study.

The Courtiers'Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris--and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian scientists, with the support of the king, dissected hundreds of animals from the royal menageries and the streets of Paris. Guerrini is the first to tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles and in front of hundreds of spectators at the King's Garden in Paris. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, Claude Perrault, with the help of Duverney's dissections, edited two folios in the 1670s filled with lavish illustrations by court artists of exotic royal animals. Through the stories of Duverney and Perrault, as well as those of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Jean Pecquet, and Louis Gayant, The Courtiers'Anatomists explores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, as well as the origins of the natural history museum and the relationship between science and other cultural activities, including art, music, and literature.

Cartesian Empiricisms considers the role Cartesians played in the acceptance of experiment in natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. It aims to correct a partial image of Cartesian philosophers as paradigmatic system builders who failed to meet challenges posed by the new science's innovative methods. Studies in this volume argue that far from being strangers to experiment, many Cartesians used and integrated it into their natural philosophies. Chapter 1 reviews the historiographies of early modern philosophy, science, and Cartesianism and their recent critiques. The first part of the volume explores various Cartesian contexts of experiment: the impact of French condemnations of Cartesian philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century; the relation between Cartesian natural philosophy and the Parisian academies of the 1660s; the complex interplay between Cartesianism and Newtonianism in the Dutch Republic; the Cartesian influence on medical teaching at theUniversity of Duisburg; and the challenges chemistry posed to the Cartesian theory of matter. The second part of the volume examines the work of particular Cartesians, such as Henricus Regius, Robert Desgabets, Jacques Rohault, Burchard de Volder, Antoine Le Grand, and Balthasar Bekker. Together these studies counter scientific revolution narratives that take rationalism and empiricism to be two mutually exclusive epistemological and methodological paradigms. The volume is thus a helpful instrument for anyone interested both in the histories of early modern philosophy and science, as well as for scholars interested in new evaluations of the historiographical tools that framed our traditional narratives.

In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland set out to determine whether the Orinoco River connected with the Amazon. But what started as a trip to investigate a relatively minor geographical controversy became the basis of a five-year exploration throughout South America, Mexico, and Cuba. The discoveries amassed by Humboldt and Bonpland were staggering, and much of today's knowledge of tropical zoology, botany, geography, and geology can be traced back to Humboldt's numerous records of these expeditions. One of these accounts, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, firmly established Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of Mesoamerican studies. In Views of the Cordilleras—first published in French between 1810 and 1813—Humboldt weaves together magnificently engraved drawings and detailed texts to achieve multifaceted views of cultures and landscapes across the Americas. In doing so, he offers an alternative perspective on the New World, combating presumptions of its belatedness and inferiority by arguing that the “old” and the “new” world are of the same geological age. This critical edition of Views of the Cordilleras—the second volume in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—contains a new, unabridged English translation of Humboldt's French text, as well as annotations, a bibliography, and all sixty-nine plates from the original edition, many of them in color.

Victorian culture was characterized by a proliferation of shows and exhibitions. These were encouraged by the development of new sciences and technologies, together with changes in transportation, education and leisure patterns. The essays in this collection look at exhibitions and their influence in terms of location, technology and ideology.

In recent decades, there has been much scholarly controversy as to the basic ontological commitments of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). The old picture of his thought as strictly idealistic, or committed to the ultimate reduction of bodies to the activity of mind, has come under attack, but Leibniz's precise conceptualization of bodies, and the role they play in his system as a whole, is still the subject of much controversy. One thing that has become clear is that in order to understand the nature of body in Leibniz, and the role body plays in his philosophy, it is crucial to pay attention to the related concepts of organism and of corporeal substance, the former being Leibniz's account of the structure of living bodies (which turn out, for him, to be the only sort of bodies there are), and the latter being an inheritance from the Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition which Leibniz appropriates for his own ends. This volume brings together papers from many of the leading scholars of Leibniz's thought, all of which deal with the cluster of questions surrounding Leibniz's philosophy of body.

The aim of an encyclopaedia is to gather together the currently accepted. Since progress in natural science and knowledge scattered over the face of the Earth, to set forth technology is generally advancing with increasing speed – its general plan to the men with whom we live and to tra- the rapid progress in computer science and software dev- mit it to the men who will come after us, in order that the la- 1 bors of past centuries may not have been in vain… opment is only one striking example of our time – it has - come more and more difficult to clearly distinguish between Denis DIDEROT Paris 1755 past and present achievements as well as to analyze their impact on other branches of science from the distant view of a historian. Recent achievements may be rated by future generations as important historical milestones, or may be HIS BOOK is an outgrowth of a previous handbook ar- 2 T ticle on the history of shock waves. While preparing forgotten completely. The scientific and technical achievements of percussion, the manuscript for this handbook, it quickly became app- explosions and shock wave research made throughout human ent that this field of enormous breadth could not be a- quately treated without also including the evolution of re- history are too immense even to be cataloged. Up to now they have been determined by estimating industrial and mi- search into percussion and explosion.

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission's participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America. By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.

This book places the present Creationist opposition to the theory of evolution in historical context by setting out the ways in which, from the seventeenth century onwards, investigations of the history of the earth and of humanity have challenged the biblical views of chronology and human destiny, and the Christian responses to these challenges. The author's interest is not primarily directed to questions such as the epistemological status of scientific versus religious knowledge or the possibility of a Darwinian ethics, but rather to the problems, and various responses to the problems, raised in a particular historical period in the West for the Bible by the massive extension of the duration of geological time and human history.

In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor—in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in eighteenth-century Paris. In the streets of the city, residents and visitors could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction.For Enlightenment-era Parisians, exotic animals both piqued scientific curiosity and conveyed social status. Their availability was a boon for naturalists like Buffon, author of the best-selling Histoire naturelle, who observed unusual species in a variety of locations around the city. Louis XVI saw his menagerie as a manifestation of his power and funded its upkeep accordingly, while critics used the caged animals as metaphors of slavery and political oppression amidst the growing political turmoil. In her engaging and often surprising account, Robbins considers nearly every aspect of France's obsession with exotic fauna, from the vast literature on exotic animals and the inner workings of the oiseleurs'(birdsellers') guild to how the animals were transported, housed, and cared for. Based on wide-ranging and imaginative research, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots stands as a major contribution to the history of human-animal relations, eighteenth-century culture, and French colonialism.