scholarly journals On receiving a first copy of Notes and Records : George Sarton to A. V. Hill, 24 February 1942

Author(s):  
Robert Fox

George Sarton, often regarded as the founder of the discipline of the history of science, appears to have first seen Notes and Records of the Royal Society in 1942. His letter of acknowledgement to A. V. Hill conveys both his pleasure at the publication (which the Royal Society had launched in 1938) and his frustration in trying to persuade scientists and ‘humanists’ of the value of his work. The letter also records Sarton's sadness at the death of his Harvard colleague L. J. Henderson, a fellow-worker in his campaign to ‘humanize science’.

George Gabriel Stokes was one of the most significant mathematicians and natural philosophers of the nineteenth century. Serving as Lucasian professor at Cambridge he made wide-ranging contributions to optics, fluid dynamics and mathematical analysis. As Secretary of the Royal Society he played a major role in the direction of British science acting as both a sounding board and a gatekeeper. Outside his own area he was a distinguished public servant and MP for Cambridge University. He was keenly interested in the relation between science and religion and wrote extensively on the matter. This edited collection of essays brings together experts in mathematics, physics and the history of science to cover the many facets of Stokes’s life in a scholarly but accessible way.


It is my pleasant duty to welcome you all most warmly to this meeting, which is one of the many events stimulated by the advisory committee of the William and Mary Trust on Science and Technology and Medicine, under the Chairmanship of Sir Arnold Burgen, the immediate past Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. This is a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the British Academy, whose President, Sir Randolph Quirk, will be Chairman this afternoon, and it covers Science and Civilization under William and Mary, presumably with the intention that the Society would cover Science if the Academy would cover Civilization. The meeting has been organized by Professor Rupert Hall, a Fellow of the Academy and also well known to the Society, who is now Emeritus Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Imperial College in the University of London; and Mr Norman Robinson, who retired in 1988 as Librarian to the Royal Society after 40 years service to the Society.


The period which saw the foundation of the Royal Society is rich in names remarkable for original achievement in the field of science, but, if we except Newton—and his first paper appeared eleven years after the foundation of the Society which is now being celebrated—none is more noteworthy than Robert Hooke. Without any advantages of birth or influence, poor in health and poor, as a young man, in worldly goods, he carried out work of the first importance in most branches of science then known, and of one branch, meteorology, he may claim to be the founder. Not only was he outstanding as an experimenter and as the inventor of new instruments, but he had an informed imagination which led him to astonishingly correct anticipations of many advances subsequently to be made. Although to many his name is known only through Hooke’s Law, outstanding figures in the history of science have been loud in his praises. Thomas Young wrote of the ‘inexhaustible but neglected mines of nascent inventions, the works of the great Robert Hooke’, a most apt phrase, since Hooke’s work contains so much that is suggestive and original, which his restless spirit lacked time to develop.


Author(s):  
A. Cook

A journal of the history of science seems almost obliged to mark the transition from one millennium to another, artificial though that may be. It seems even more contrived for a journal that is about science related to The Royal Society, for our history spans not even a millennium but almost exactly one–third of that period. Yet the history of science in those years has much to teach us today about the practice and use of science and to help in promoting its understanding among the wider public. The Society and its Fellows have been particularly deeply involved in the development of a number of disciplines, and so we have essays on representative topics—time, microscopy, exploration, geology and planetary studies, together with some cautionary tales about prediction—though not the only ones that could have been included. One topic, the science of materials, is represented by a book review. As is usual for the first issue of a year, we include the President's Address to the Anniversary Meeting—his last, and the last of the millennium


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