Editor Charlotte Sleigh writes:
Waddling into Autumn 2015, the third issue of BJHS for 2015 opens with Natalie Lawrence’s account of how early-modern naturalists fitted the dodo into contemporary systems of taxonomy. Dodos are somehow inherently intriguing, but this paper makes a more general contribution to the history of science by showing how the emblematic and the natural-historical were blended even in early-modern systems of knowledge.
Two articles deal with the current hot research topic of nineteenth-century observatory sciences, one at the heart of the British empire and the other farther afield. Lee Macdonald’s story of the Kew Observatory is the former. Far from being the creation of John Herschel, as some might suppose, this institution turns out to be the awkward product of several institutions, and of ‘scientific servicemen’. Such apparently non-central figures of science – military and medical men – also played an important role in the foundation of the observatory in the Straits Settlement, as Fiona Williamson explores in her study of imperial meteorology.
Bill Jenkins, meanwhile, subjects the father of phrenology, George Combe, to investigation in relation to another infamous science of his day – transformism. He argues that Combe’s hereditarianism was not directly related to Lamarckian science but formed part of a wider discourse on heredity in the early nineteenth century. David Livingstone tackles another sometimes controversial combination, namely religion and science. His essay examines two late nineteenth-century figures – Alexander Winchell in the United States and William Robertson Smith in Britain – both of whom found in anthropology resources to vindicate divine revelation: in Winchell’s case from the physical anthropology of human origins and in Smith’s from the cultural anthropology of Semitic ritual. It did not end well for either of them.
The famous Edwards’s Dodo, painted by Roelant Savery in 1626
See also: BJHS at Cambridge University Press.
