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The incorporation of paper instruments, also known as volvelles, into astronomical and cosmographical texts is a well-known facet of sixteenth-century printing. However, the impact that these instruments had on the reading public has yet to be determined. This paper argues that the inclusion of paper instruments in Peter Apian's Cosmographia transforms the text into a book-instrument hybrid. The instruments and accompanying text in Cosmographia enabled readers to make their own measurements and calculations of both the heavens and the earth. Through the experience of manipulating the instruments, the readers became participants in sixteenth century mathematical culture, and thus mathematical amateurs. I conclude that the presence of these mathematical amateurs contributed to a much broader social base for the cultural shift towards an empirical understanding of nature from 1500 to 1700.

There is a unique cluster of four medieval round churches, linked by a simple geometry, on Bornholm Island in the Baltic Sea. Why so many and why so close together? Immediate simple answers are "Just by chance" and "For no reason." Why are the churches round? "Defense." This essay proposes another hypothesis for this unique situation: the churches are astronomical observatories, meant to solve a scientific problem (Is the Earth really spherical?) and a practical problem (How far is it to sail west to the Orient?). The capacity and desire to find answers, together with other practical needs related to astronomy, can better explain these round churches' special architecture. The geometry that connects them fits the ideal pattern with an angular accuracy of 1 minute of a degree. The round churches may be the earliest astronomical observatories in Christian Europe; other hypotheses have been shown to be untenable. Their location provides for a good method to estimate the Earth's extent in the east-west direction, seemingly the earliest such measurements.

Built in 1769 as a private observatory for King George III, Kew Observatory was taken over in 1842 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). It was then quickly transformed into what some claimed to be a 'physical observatory' of the sort proposed by John Herschel - an observatory that gathered data in a wide range of physical sciences, including geomagnetism and meteorology, rather than just astronomy. Yet this article argues that the institution which emerged in the 1840s was different in many ways from that envisaged by Herschel. It uses a chronological framework to show how, at every stage, the geophysicist and Royal Artillery officer Edward Sabine manipulated the project towards his own agenda: an independent observatory through which he could control the geomagnetic and meteorological research, including the ongoing 'Magnetic Crusade'. The political machinations surrounding Kew Observatory, within the Royal Society and the BAAS, may help to illuminate the complex politics of science in early Victorian Britain, particularly the role of 'scientific servicemen' such as Sabine. Both the diversity of activities at Kew and the complexity of the observatory's origins make its study important in the context of the growing field of the 'observatory sciences'.

The goal of this paper, both historical and philosophical, is to launch a new case into the scientific realism debate: geocentric astronomy. Scientific realism about unobservables claims that the non-observational content of our successful/justified empirical theories is true, or approximately true. The argument that is currently considered the best in favor of scientific realism is the No Miracles Argument: the predictive success of a theory that makes (novel) observational predictions while making use of non-observational content would be inexplicable unless such non-observational content approximately corresponds to the world "out there". Laudan's pessimistic meta-induction challenged this argument, and realists reacted by moving to a "selective" version of realism: the approximately true part of the theory is not its full non-observational content but only the part of it that is responsible for the novel, successful observational predictions. Selective scientific realism has been tested against some of the theories in Laudan's list, but the first member of this list, geocentric astronomy, has been traditionally ignored. Our goal here is to defend that Ptolemy's Geocentrism deserves attention and poses a prima facie strong case against selective realism, since it made several successful, novel predictions based on theoretical hypotheses that do not seem to be retained, not even approximately, by posterior theories. Here, though, we confine our work just to the detailed reconstruction of what we take to be the main novel, successful Ptolemaic predictions, leaving the full analysis and assessment of their significance for the realist thesis to future works., (Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

In 1905 the Campos Rodrigues Observatory (CRO) was founded in Lourenço Marques (nowadays Maputo), the capital of Mozambique, by then part of the Portuguese overseas empire. In this paper the inception and early history of the CRO are analysed in the broader context of the interwoven history of the Portuguese and British empires in Africa, and specifically with respect to the scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa. The equipment, personnel, practices and networks involved in the inception and early development of the CRO are brought into focus in order to illustrate the problems and strategies that shaped the establishment and functioning of this observatory, which was conceived essentially as a symbol of imperial stamina and colonial prowess. It is suggested that by providing a focal point for the development of scientific relations between Mozambique and South Africa, the CRO served both Portuguese ambitions for recognition as an imperial power and the emergence of South African nationalism.

In the Scholium to the Definitions in Principia mathematica, Newton departs from his main task of discussing space, time and motion by suddenly mentioning the proper method for interpreting Scripture. This is surprising, and it has long been ignored by scholars. In this paper, I argue that the Scripture passage in the Scholium is actually far from incidental: it reflects Newton's substantive concern, one evident in correspondence and manuscripts from the 1680s, that any general understanding of space, time and motion must enable readers to recognize the veracity of Biblical claims about natural phenomena, including the motion of the earth. This substantive concern sheds new light on an aspect of Newton's project in the Scholium. It also underscores Newton's originality in dealing with the famous problem of reconciling theological and philosophical conceptions of nature in the seventeenth century., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In his Letters on the motion impressed by a moving mover, the theory of the motion of composite bodies put forth by Gassendi is strikingly similar to Galileo's. In other of his writings, however, his description of the motion of individual atoms is understood very differently. In those places, he holds (1) that individual atoms are always in motion, even when the body that contains them is at rest, (2) that atomic motion is discontinuous although the motion of composite bodies is at least apparently continuous, and (3) that atomic motion is grounded in an intrinsic vis motrix, motive power. In contrast, composite bodies simply persist in their state of motion or rest in the absence of outside interference. Unfortunately, Gassendi neglects to explain how his accounts of atomic and composite motion fit together, and it is difficult to see how they could possibly be integrated. My goal is to explain, given this difficulty, why he accepted both the Galilean theory of the motion of composite bodies and the Epicurean theory of atomic motion., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Galileo and Descartes were on the front lines of the defense of Copernicanism against theological objections that took on special importance during the seventeenth century. Galileo attempted to overcome opposition to Copernicanism within the Catholic Church by offering a demonstration of this theory that appeals to the fact that the double motion of the earth is necessary as a cause of the tides. It turns out, however, that the details of Galileo's tidal theory compromise his demonstration. Far from attempting to provide a demonstration of the earth's motion, Descartes ultimately argued that his system is compatible with the determination of the Church that the earth is at rest. Nonetheless, Descartes's account of the cause of the tides creates difficulty for this argument., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In the nineteenth-century globalizing world of colonial expansion and maritime trade, systematic study of ocean currents and winds became of increased concern in various seafaring nations. Both naval officers and university professors engaged in maritime meteorological and hydrographic research. In order to attract the attention of the state and obtain support for establishment of national scientific institutes, university professors teamed up with naval officers in building networks for maritime data collection, thus connecting practical utility to academic credentials. This paper looks into the combined efforts of the U.S. Navy lieutenant M. F. Maury and the Dutch naval officer M. H. Jansen in organizing the 1853 International Maritime Conference in Brussels, which aimed to develop a worldwide system of uniform atmospheric and marine observations. Such efforts, however, amounted to walking a tightrope between mutual interests and personal rivalries. The alliance between elite scientists and naval officers proved to be only temporary. Once the meteorological institutes were established, academically trained meteorologists gradually marginalized the role of naval officers in scientific research at the institutes, thereby establishing and securing their authority in maritime science.

Caroline Herschel was rare among her female contemporaries in gaining public recognition for her work in science, yet her role in this process and her role in designing her training have never previously been studied. We know that access to education and participation in science was different for men and women in the eighteenth century. However, drawing on feminist, pedagogical and biographical approaches to history, I argue that although access depended on a variety of factors, a more consistent gender divide came in lessons on how to learn, and in what was regarded as appropriate behaviour. Caroline's skill--so often misunderstood--was to be aware of the differences and to use them to her own advantage.

In the third century B.C.E., Eratosthenes of Cyrene made a famous measurement of the circumference of the Earth. This was not the first such measurement, but it is the earliest for which significant details are preserved. Cleomedes gives a short account of Eratosthenes' method, his numerical assumptions, and the final result of 250,000 stades. However, many ancient sources attribute to Eratosthenes a result of 252,000 stades. Historians have attempted to explain the second result by supposing that Eratosthenes later made better measurements and revised his estimate or that the original result was simply rounded to 252,000 to have a number conveniently divisible by 60 or by 360. These explanations are speculative and untestable. However, Eratosthenes' estimates of the distances of the Sun and Moon from the Earth are preserved in the doxographical literature. This essay shows that Eratosthenes' result of 252,000 stades for the Earth's circumference follows from a solar distance that is attributed to him. Thus it appears that Eratosthenes computed not only a lower limit for the size of the Earth, based on the assumption that the Sun is at infinity, but also an upper limit, based on the assumption that the Sun is at a finite distance. The essay discusses the consequences for our understanding of his program.

Centring on John Flamsteed (1646-1719), the first Astronomer Royal, this paper investigates the ways in which astronomers of the late seventeenth century worked to build and maintain their reputations by demonstrating, for their peers and for posterity, their proficiency in managing visual technologies. By looking at his correspondence and by offering a graphic and textual analysis of the preface to his posthumous Historia Coelestis Britannica (1725), I argue that Flamsteed based the legitimacy of his life's work on his capacity to serve as a skilful astronomer who could coordinate the production and proper use of astronomical sighting instruments. Technological advances in astrometry were, for Flamsteed, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the advancement of astronomy. Technological resources needed to be used by the right person. The work of the skilful astronomer was a necessary precondition for the mobilization and proper management of astronomical technologies. Flamsteed's understanding of the astronomer as a skilled actor importantly shifted the emphasis in precision astronomical work away from the individual observer's ability to see well and toward the astronomer's ability to ensure that instruments guaranteed accurate vision.

The aim of this paper is to examine the iconography on a set of star charts by Albrecht Dürer (1515), and celestial globes by Caspar Vopel (1536) and Christoph Schissler (1575). The iconography on these instruments is conditioned by strong traditions which include not only the imagery on globes and planispheres (star charts), but also ancient literature about the constellations. Where this iconography departs from those traditions, the change had to do with humanism in the sixteenth century. This "humanistic" dimension is interwoven with other concerns that involve both "social" and "technical" motivations. The interplay of these three dimensions illustrates how the iconography on celestial charts and globes expresses some features of the shared knowledge and shared culture between artisans, mathematicians, and nobles in Renaissance Europe.

The Almagestum parvum, a summary of Ptolemy's Almagest written around the year 1200, provided a new stylistic framework for the content of theAlmagest's first six books. The author of the Almagestum parvum used a narrower range of types of mathematical writing and supplied his work with principles, which were listed at the beginning of each book and which were followed by propositions and demonstrations. Specific values were to a large extent replaced by general quantities, which would stand for a class of particulars. These and similar changes in the Almagestum parvum reveal the author's concern with reshaping astronomy into a discipline in the mold of Euclid's Elements, which emphasized the generality of propositions and proofs and connected Ptolemaic astronomy to the "mathematical toolbox" available in the Middle Ages. The Almagestum parvum was an influential part of a larger trend of understanding Ptolemaic astronomy in a non-Ptolemaic style.

A manuscript by Georg and Sigmund Merz dated 1862 and containing instructions for assembling the equatorial telescope acquired by the Palermo Observatory is conserved in the archives of the Museo Astronomico e Copernicano in Rome. It is a rare document that reveals "tricks of the trade" and technical knowledge not usually included in textbooks or treatises. It was sent to the Palermo Observatory as an aid to the installation of the telescope, which made a signal contribution to the development of solar physics in Italy in the 19th century. Based on the study of unpublished sources (consisting of texts and drawings), the history of the instrument has been retraced. This paper presents a detailed description of the Merz manuscript (including a complete transcript) and some technical drawings recently discovered in the archives of the Palermo Observatory.

When Tycho Brahe published a description of his astronomical instruments in 1598 as part of a strategy to procure royal patronage, it was not with one of his grander, precision measurement tools that he opened his account, but rather a small brass quadrant with limited observational utility. The defining feature of this instrument was seemingly a small emblematic image inscribed within the arc of the quadrant. Through this symbolic motif Tycho conveyed a moralising message about the relative worth of astronomy. Considering a range of visual productions that may have influenced his iconography, the present paper situates the quadrant within the broader context of Renaissance visual culture and examines the significance of the quadrant in Tycho's wider instrument collection.

John Herschel (1792-1871) was the leading British natural philosopher of the nineteenth century, widely known and regarded for his work in philosophy, optics and chemistry as well as his important research and popular publications on astronomy. To date, however, there exists no extended treatment of his astronomical career. This paper, part of a larger study exploring Herschel's contributions to astronomy, examines his work in the context of positional astronomy, the dominant form of astronomical practice throughout his lifetime. Herschel, who did not himself practice positional astronomy and who was known for his non-meridional observations of specific stellar objects, was nonetheless a strong advocate for positional astronomy-but for very different reasons than the terrestrial applications to which it was most often put. For Herschel, the star catalogues of positional astronomy were the necessary observational foundation upon which information about the stars as physical objects could be constructed. Positional astronomy practiced in the great national observatories was not about navigation or timekeeping; it was a way to standardize stellar observations and make them useful data for constructing theories of the stars themselves. For Herschel, the seeds of the new astronomy emerged from the practices of the old.

Irrespective of geo- or heliocentric presuppositions, the functioning of sundials is based on the observation of moving shadows or light spots. Even though the cast shadow was often simply used to indicate the time, it could also remind the users of the ephemerality of earthly things or function as an index of planetary movements. This article examines the various ways in which early modem sundials visually interpret the moving shadow or light spot. The instruments address the shadow in inscriptions, integrate it into their design (e.g., in cruciform dials) or even manipulate its course (as in the so-called Horologium Ahaz). Both the crucifix and the Ahaz dials not only refer to astronomical miracles but actually restage them. Even though by means of the horologium it was not possible to explain the Old Testament miracle of the shadow moving backward, adepts were able to recreate it on a terrestrial scale.

This paper examines a polyhedral dial from the British Museum made by the instrument maker Ulrich Schniep, and discusses the status of multifunctional scientific instruments. It discerns a multifaceted iconic meaning considering different dimensions such as scientific functionality (astronomy), the complex allegorical figure of Justice (iconography), and the representation of the sovereign (politics), the court and the Kunstkammer of Albrecht v of Bavaria. As a numen mixtum the figure of "Justicia" touches different fields that go far beyond pure astronomical measurement and represents the power of the ruler as well as the rules of economic justice.

Western observatories became scientific factories from the mid-19th century. Astrometry symbolized the transition to an industrious economy of scientific practices. The printing chronograph, which reduced the personal equations of the observers, was, first in the United States, then in England, the symbolic instrument of this transformation. In France, the initiatives of the astronomer Liais were prototypical. In the practices of the Hendaye Observatory, and thanks to the abbé Verschaffel, the printing chronograph made its definitive entry in French observatories at the beginning of the 20th century. Excessive centralization of French astronomy, the authoritarianism of Urbain Le Verrier, the director of the Paris Observatory, and the poor market for scientific instruments explain why the printing chronograph took root, belatedly, in France.

At the center of this article is an iconographic analysis of the eight silver reliefs on the sides of a table clock made in 1591 by Jost Burgi, the court clockmaker of Landgrave Wilhelm iv of Hessen-Kassel. The reliefs present an astronomical ancestral picture gallery, running from the Patriarchs of the Old Testament to Copernicus. The author argues that the "storyboard" for this sequence of images must have been conceived down to its smallest details by the Kassel court astronomer Christoph Rothmann; indeed, many of the scenes shown, along with many particular details depicted within them, are literally described in Rothmann's never-published manuscript Observationes stellarum fixarum of 1589. The final section of the essay compares these reliefs to the images created for Tycho Brahe at his Uraniborg and Stjerneborg observatories. The author concludes that the sequence of the reliefs in Kassel, culminating in the representation of Copernicus and his world view, is a reflection of the acrimonious debate extending over many years between the heliocentrist Rothmann and the geo-heliocentrist Brahe regarding the veracity of the heliocentric world view.

The early astrophysicist Norman Lockyer was both editor of the journal Nature from its creation in 1869 and for the following five decades, and an early practioner of the new astronomy. He frequently used the journal to expound his scientific theories, report on his work and send news home while on expeditions. I look into the particular visual culture of astrophysics developed by Lockyer in Nature, its evolution at a time of rapid development both of the techniques of astrophysical observation and visualization and of the techniques of image reproduction in print. A study of the use and reuse of visual materials in different settings also makes it possible to sketch the circulating economy of Lockyer's images and the ways in which he put himself forward as a scientist, at a time when he was advocating the State support of research and scientists and helping create the modern scientific journal.

Jan Jędrzejewicz was an amateur astronomer who in the 2nd half of the 19th century created an observation centre, which considering the level of research was comparable to the European ones. Jędrzejewicz settled down in Plonsk in 1862 and worked as a doctor ever since but his greatest passion was astronomy, to which he dedicated all his free time. In 1875 Jędrzejewicz finished the construction of his observatory. He equipped it with basic astronomical and meteorological instruments, then began his observations and with time he became quite skilled in it. Jędrzejewicz focused mainly on binary stars but he also pointed his telescopes at the planets of the solar system, the comets, the Sun, as well as all the phenomena appearing in the sky at that time. Thanks to the variety of the objects observed and the number of observations he stood out from other observers in Poland and took a very good position in the mainstream of the 19th-century astronomy in Europe. Micrometer observations of binary stars made in Płońsk gained recognition in the West and were included in the catalogues of binary stars. Interest in Jędrzejewicz and his observatory was confirmed by numerous references in the English "Nature" magazine.

A frequently overlooked aspect of the knowledge transfer from Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century is the introduction of the Islamo-Arabic calendar, which confronted Western computists with a radically different scheme of lunar reckoning that was in some ways superior to the 19-year lunar cycle of the Roman Church. One of the earliest sources to properly discuss this new system and compare it to the old one is the anonymous Collatio Compoti Romani et Arabici, found in a manuscript from Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire. This article contains the first edition and translation of this previously unknown text, preceded by an analysis of its content and sources. As will be argued, the text was written in the second quarter of the twelfth century as a reaction to the astronomical tables of al-Khwāizmī, recently translated by Adelard of Bath, as well as to eclipse observations that had exposed the flaws of the 'Roman' computation.

In the autumn of 1863 Otto Wilhelm Struve, director of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, visited most of the observatories in Italy. The report that he wrote on this occasion provides an overview on the conditions of astronomical research in Italyjust after the unification of the country. Later Struve sent a French translation of his report to the Italian astronomer Giovan Battista Donati, who used it to promote the construction of the Arcetri Observatory in Florence, which was inaugurated in 1872. We present here a transcription of the French translation of Struve's report and the transcription of a letter written by him in support of Donati's project

Over its long history, the buildings of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich were enlarged and altered many times, reflecting changing needs and expectations of astronomers and funders, but also the constraints of a limited site and small budgets. The most significant expansion took place in the late nineteenth century, overseen by the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, a programme that is put in the context of changing attitudes toward scientific funding, Christie's ambitious plans for the work and staffing of the Observatory and his desire to develop a national institution that could stand with more recently founded European and American rivals. Examination of the archives reveals the range of strategies Christie was required to use to acquire consent and financial backing from the Admiralty, as well as his opportunistic approach. While hindsight might lead to criticism of his decisions, Christie eventually succeeded in completing a large building - the New Physical Observatory - that, in its decoration, celebrated Greenwich's past while, in its name, style, structure and contents, it was intended to signal the institution's modernization and future promise.

Despite his demanding religious responsibilities, Paolo Sarpi maintained an active involvement in science between 1578 and 1598- as his Pensieri reveal. They show that from 1585 onwards he studied the Copernican theory and recorded arguments in its favour. The fact that for 1595 they include an outline of a Copernican tidal theory resembling Galileo's Dialogue theory is well known. But examined closely, Sarpi's theory is found to be different from that of the Dialogue in several important respects. That Sarpi was a Copernican by 1592 is revealed by other of his pensieri, whereas at that time we know that Galileo was not. The examination of Sarpi's tidal theory and of the work of Galileo in this period indicates that the theory Sarpi recorded in 1595 was of his own creation. The appreciation that the theory was Sarpi's and that Galileo subsequently came to change his views on the Copernican theory and adopted the tidal theory has major implications for our understanding of the significance of Sarpi's contribution to the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, it appears that several of the most significant theoretical features of the tidal theory published by Galileo in the Dialogue - and which proved of lasting value - were in reality Sarpi's.

This paper explores how nineteenth-century Liverpool became such an advanced city with regard to public timekeeping, and the wider impact of this on the standardisation of time. From the mid-1840s, local scientists and municipal bodies in the port city were engaged in improving the ways in which accurate time was communicated to ships and the general public. As a result, Liverpool was the first British city to witness the formation of a synchronised clock system, based on an invention by Robert Jones. His method gained a considerable reputation in the scientific and engineering communities, which led to its subsequent replication at a number of astronomical observatories such as Greenwich and Edinburgh. As a further key example of developments in time-signalling techniques, this paper also focuses on the time ball established in Liverpool by the Electric Telegraph Company in collaboration with George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal. This is a particularly significant development because, as the present paper illustrates, one of the most important technologies in measuring the accuracy of the Greenwich time signal took shape in the experimental operation of the time ball. The inventions and knowledge which emerged from the context of Liverpool were vital to the transformation of public timekeeping in Victorian Britain.

Mid twentieth century meteor astronomy demanded the long-term compilation of observations made by numerous individuals over an extensive geographical area. Such a massive undertaking obviously required the participation of more than just professional astronomers, who often sought to expand their ranks through the use of amateurs that had a basic grasp of astronomy as well as the night sky, and were thus capable of generating first-rate astronomical reports. When, in the 1920s, renowned Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark turned his attention to meteor astronomy, he was unable to rely even upon this solution. In contrast to many other countries at the time, Sweden lacked an organized amateur astronomy and thus contained only a handful of competent amateurs. Given this situation, Lundmark had to develop ways of engaging the general public in assisting his efforts. To his advantage, he was already a well-established public figure who had published numerous popular science articles and held talks from time to time on the radio. During the 1930s, this prominence greatly facilitated his launching of a crowdsourcing initiative for the gathering of meteor observations. This paper consists of a detailed discussion concerning the means by which Lundmark's initiative disseminated astronomical knowledge to the general public and encouraged a response that might directly contribute to the advancement of science. More precisely, the article explores the manner in which he approached the Swedish public, the degree to which that public responded and the extent to which his efforts were successful. The primary aim of this exercise is to show that the apparently recent Internet phenomenon of 'crowdsourcing', especially as it relates to scientific research, actually has a pre-Internet history that is worth studying. Apart from the fact that this history is interesting in its own right, knowing it can provide us with a fresh vantage point from which to better comprehend and appreciate the success of present-day crowdsourcing projects.

The role of technicians and background characters in the historical practice of science is slowly gaining recognition. This paper looks at the collective effort involved in learning science, using as my case study the eighteenth-century musician turned astronomer, William Herschel. Lacking a university education, Herschel, like many contemporaries, presented himself as self-taught, thereby hiding his engagement with a rich network of didactic resources. Placing Herschel's story within the history of pedagogy, I argue that this network, previously discussed only in the context of popular or marketplace science, was an important resource for science education at its highest level.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many attempts to justify political and social systems on the basis of physics and astronomy. By the early twentieth century such moves increasingly also integrated the life and social sciences. The physical sciences gradually became less appealing as a sole source for sociopolitical thought. The details of this transition help explain the contemporary reluctance to capitalize on an ostensibly rich opportunity for naturalistic social reasoning: the anthropic principle in cosmology, which deals with the apparent "fine-tuning" of the universe for life.

Hubert Airy's iconic drawing of his own migraine visual aura for which he coined the term, "teichopsia," conveys important lessons for the contemporary clinician. His observations of the expansion ("build-up"), minification/magnification, and color/achromatopsia of migrainous teichopsia are consistent with (and possibly anticipatory of) the later discoveries of cortical spreading depression, cortical magnification of primary visual cortex (V1), and specialized cortical centers for color vision.

José Celestino Mutis y Bosio was a Spanish physician, naturalist, astronomer, priest, theologian and mathematician, and one of the icons of the Enlightment Age both in Spain and the American Continent. As the Viceroy's personal doctor, he travelled to the territory of New Granada in what is now Colombia. Mutis was the creator and first leader of the Royal Botanic Expedition of New Granada to study South American wildlife, discovering thousands of new species. He also launched several Public Health measures in the Santa Fe area, helping to introduce a vaccination campaign. Mutis was the first person to introduce Newtonian physics in the Spanish America and he established the first Observatory in the New World which is still in use. He was deeply admired and recognized as a prominent scientist by great personalities of his time including Carl von Linée and Alexander von Humboldt., (© The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.)

Based on certain texts written by Portugal's cosmographers of the kingdom between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, we bring to light the technical and scientific foundations for the European maritime expansion, highlighting the relationships between them and the making and use of the mathematical instruments used in ocean navigation. Our objective is not just to underline the scientific aspects of the artefacts used for these measurements, but also to ascertain how science and knowledge acquired a practical, strategic and symbolic meaning within the context of Portugal's expansion overseas.

The Royal Society Conversaziones were biannual social evenings at which distinguished guests could learn about the latest scientific developments. The Conversazione in May 1952 featured an object that came to be called King Arthur's Table. It was a planetary equatorium, made in Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory at the behest of Sir Lawrence Bragg. Conceived by the historian of science Derek de Solla Price as a huge, tangible realization of Chaucerian astronomy, it was displayed at the new Whipple Museum of the History of Science, discarded, stored incognito, catalogued with that whimsical name, and finally re-identified in 2012. This article examines the biography of that object and, through it, the early, inchoate years of the discipline of history of science in Cambridge. The process of disciplinary establishment involved a range of actors beyond well-known figures such as Herbert Butterfield and Joseph Needham; the roles of Price and Bragg are highlighted here. Study of these individuals, and of the collaboration that brought about the reconstruction, reveals much about the establishment of a discipline, as well as changing scholarly and curatorial attitudes towards replicas.

Elected in 1723, Isaac de Sequeira Samuda (1681-1729) was the first Jewish Fellow of the Royal Society. He had arrived in London just a few years earlier, escaping from the Portuguese Inquisition. Despite his past, he had no difficulty in establishing links with his country's diplomatic representatives in London. A physician and adviser on scientific subjects, he became a conduit between the emerging world of Portuguese astronomy and the British scientific community. He reported to the Royal Society on astronomical observations made in the new observatories in Lisbon and helped with the acquisition of scientific instruments and books destined for Portugal. These activities were facets of Samuda's unusual career and the diverse though often converging associations that he established until his death. As the member of a network active in the diffusion of new ideas and in the modernization of Portuguese science, Samuda can be regarded as an estrangeirado, as this term has come to be used in the modern literature.

Yale science professor Denison Olmsted used crowdsourcing to gather observations from across the United States of the unexpected deluge of meteors on 13 November 1833--more than 72,000/h. He used these observations (and newspaper accounts and correspondence from scientists) to make a commendably accurate interpretation of the meteor storm, overturning 2100 years of erroneous teachings about shooting stars and establishing meteor science as a new branch of astronomy. Olmsted's success was substantially based on his use of newspapers and their practice of news pooling to solicit observations from throughout the country by lay and expert observers professionally unaffiliated with Yale College and him. In today's parlance, Olmsted was a remarkably successful early practitioner of scientific crowdsourcing, also known as citizen science. He may have been the first to use mass media for crowdsourcing in science. He pioneered many of the citizen-science crowdsourcing practices that are still in use today: an open call for citizen participation, a clearly defined task, a large geographical distribution for gathering data and a rapid response to opportunistic events. Olmsted's achievement is not just that he used crowdsourcing in 1833 but that crowdsourcing helped him to advance science significantly., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written by Giovanni Battista Amico and Girolamo Fracastoro at Padua a few decades later. He also knew about theories pioneered by the Damascene Ibn al-Shāţir (d. 1375) that strongly resemble portions of Copernicus's work. Next, the article turns to concrete evidence showing that Galeano was part of a network of Jewish scholars who did have contact with Christian scholars in Europe. The essay concludes that, while it is impossible to prove that Galeano had direct contact with Copernicus, he most likely had contact with some European astronomer(s) in the Veneto.

The Seki Teisyo (see text for symbol), a manuscript compiled by Seki Takakazu (see text for symbol)) in 1686, is known to consist of 15 treatises which Seki extracted from an early Qing astronomical and astrological corpus, the Tianwen Dacheng Guankui Jiyao (see text for symbol). Containing a detailed account of the Shoushi Li (see text for symbol) as well as a comparative study of Chinese and Islamic calendrical systems, these treatises have drawn the attention not only of Seki but of modern historians. In this paper, I show that 14 of the 15 treatises Seki selected had been composed by a late Ming scholar, Zhou Shuxue (see text for symbol), who discussed issues with Tang Shunzhi (see text for symbol). Their time predates the era in which the mathematical basis of the Shoushi Li was scrutinized and a new Chinese calendrical system was invented incorporating Western astronomical knowledge. I also mention some earlier works that Tang and Zhou could have consulted. Although Seki never knew the author of the treatises nor their background, his concern centered on themes that seem to have derived from one of those earlier works: the Liyuan(see text for symbol).

Previous research on the origins of double star astronomy in the early nineteenth century emphasized the role mathematical methods and instrumentation played in motivating early observations of these objects. The work of the British astronomer John Herschel, however, shows that questions regarding the physical nature of double stars were also important. In particular, an analysis of John Herschel's early work on double stars illustrates the way in which speculations regarding these objects were shaped by assumptions of the properties of stars themselves. For Herschel, a major consideration in double star astronomy was distinguishing between types of double stars. Optical doubles were useful in determining parallax while binary doubles were not. In practice, classification of a specific double star pair into one of these categories was based on the assumption that stars were of approximately the same luminosity and thus differences in relative brightness between stars were caused by difference in distances. Such assumptions, though ultimately abandoned, would lead Herschel in the 1830s to advance the possibility that the dim companion stars in certain double star pairs were not stars at all but in fact planets., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)