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Please note that these abstracts are subject to change. All abstracts will be printed in the final meeting program. If you would like to make corrections, please e-mail the changes to hssexec@u.washington.edu by 25 May!

Jennifer K. Alexander University of Minnesota
Viva vis viva: John Smeaton, vis viva, and Engineering Experiments in the Industrial Revolution

Historians of science and historians of technology have often talked past each other, but recent work in the history of scientific instruments suggests an avenue of rapprochement. The eighteenth-century British engineer John Smeaton, for example, was also widely known as a maker of scientific instruments. In addition, in 1759 he received the highest honor Britain's Royal Society could bestow, the Copley Medal, for experiments on the motive force of wind and water. Several aspects of Smeaton's work have interested historians of science, improvements to the mariner's compass, for example, and various devices to measure the elasticity of materials. This paper examines these devices from the perspective of Smeaton's career as a practicing engineer. In particular, it takes up one specific quantity, vis viva, or living force, which informed Smeaton's engineering work but which historians of science have argued was largely confined to the mathematical and theoretical discussions of people who were decidedly not what Smeaton called "practical men." Practical men, however, were indeed interested in and influenced by discussions in mechanics, and they, like Smeaton, made use of some principles while rejecting others, because they found them unworkable in engineering practice. This paper thus takes up another current debate in the history of science and technology: the debt which industrialization may or may not owe to the science of mechanics. One may argue for such a debt only very carefully, this paper suggests, for Smeaton's work illustrates the practical inadequacy of the mechanics of his day. He himself remarked on this very point, and undertook his famous experiments on wind and water precisely because he found the mechanics of textbooks and public lectures of little use to the practical man. His work, honored by the Royal Society, stood in contrast: he believed it was of practical use.

Maher Aly Alexandria University, Egypt
Medical Schools Traditions In Ancient Egypt

The main purpose of the recent research can be noticed within the whole context of the Ancient Egyptians knowledge of Science. The flourishing of Science in one aspect was accompanied with vital consequences in other Sciences. One can ask to how extent medical education assemblies present certain knowledge about practicing medicine? What are the methodological elements implied in that kind of teaching? However, while searching the nature of medical assemblies, one is inclined to deal with the continuity of these assemblies: Is there any relation to these assemblies with the Greek ones? And if there is any relation: what elements remained in the Greek medicine, and what was left? No doubt, the referred question is an epistemological one. If the answer proved the continuity of the ancient Egyptian medical educational assemblies, this will be of great help within the context of dealing with the tradition of the Alexandrine School. If we proved the continuity (or perhaps, the transition) of the Egyptian traditions within the Greek and the Alexandrine medical teaching, then we can claim the possibility of the existence of such elements in the Arab medical teaching. The turning point in the above cited idea is that the continuity of such idea represents a major shift in the epistemological of continuity through a very long period of time, and this in turn will reveal new problems.

Paul T. Arpaia Baruch College
Evolving into Italians: Evolutionism in Giosuè Carducci's Conception of Italian Cultural and Political Identity

In the debate over the origins and nature of Italian Fascism, recent studies have argued that Fascism--usually thought of as an heir to modernism and antipositivism--owes instead a greater debt to nineteenth-century positivism and scientific theories. These studies focus on pre-Fascist and Fascist "intellectuals," social scientists who embraced Fascism, or prominent politicians such as Benito Mussolini. However, they fail to consider the Nationalist wing of the Fascist Party whose members came primarily from humanistic backgrounds and who were avowed opponents of "Darwinism," positivism, and atheism. The Nationalists, who merged with the Fascists in 1923, were key players in the political and cultural life of Italy. They facilitated Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, salvaged his government during the Matteotti Crisis of 1925, held key cultural and academic positions in the 1930s, and helped orchestrate Mussolini's arrest when the tide of World War II turned against Italy in 1943. This paper will analyze the impact of scientific theories on Giosuč Carducci, a Nobel laureate in literature, professor of literature at the University of Bologna, and one of the primary intellectual influences on the Nationalist wing of the Fascist Party. His conception of culture and politics served as a central component of the Nationalists^Â political program and was adopted by the Fascist Party upon the merger of the two parties. Recognized as the "poet of the Third Italy" prior to Fascism, Carducci was elevated to the Fascist Pantheon of intellectual precursors by Mussolini. The paper will show that Carducci's formulation of Italian culture and politics borrowed from neo-Lamarckism, while his conception of culture bore strikingly similarities to Ernst Haeckel's Biogenetic Law. Despite his reliance on scientific theories, the paper will argue that Carducci's conception of culture and politics was more the product of poorly-assimilated scientific theories than a logical consequence of them. The indirect influence of nineteenth-century scientific theories on Carducci and the Nationalist wing of the Fascist Party suggests the need to reconsider the role science and scientific theories played in nineteenth-century intellectual, cultural and political circles and, in particular the debt Italian Fascism owed to nineteenth-century science.

Renzo Baldasso University of Oklahoma
Galileo's Dialogo and Scheiner's Rosa Ursina

This paper explains why Galileo abandoned his theory that the sun moved the planets. The first part of the paper reviews the evidence for Galileo's theory that the sun's axial rotation was the cause of planetary motions. This claim appeared repeatedly in Galileo's writings from the period 1611-1615 and was presented as the most important argument for the heliocentric cosmos. Perhaps because he later abandoned it, scholarly accounts have considered it to be mere rhetoric. However, both Bruno and Kepler believed that Copernican dynamics required a rotating sun Galileo's telescopic investigations of the sun "demonstrated," through the discovery of the sunspots and the analysis of their movements, that the sun had an axial rotation with the period of a lunar month. This fact supported the conviction that the sun guided planetary movements. The second part of the paper considers the few statements contained in Galileo's 1632 Dialogue, from which I conclude that the sun's axial rotation no longer was the direct cause of the planets' motions for Galileo. He had to abandon this important theory in light of the research on sunspots carried out by Jesuits astronomers. In fact, in 1630, after eighteen years of careful sunspots observations, Christopher Scheiner, the leading Jesuit authority in astronomy, had published his Rosa Ursina. There Scheiner presented overwhelming evidence to exclude the possibility of a causal connection between the sun's axial rotation and planetary motions. His arguments hinged upon both the period of the solar rotation and the inclination of the sun's rotational axis.

Ruth Barton The University of Auckland
"Men of Science": Language, Identity and the Professionalization of British Science, 1850-1880

This paper approaches the issue of the professionalization of British science in the mid-Victorian period by examining the language which members and would-be members of the scientific community used both to describe themselves and to identify groups within the community. "Men of science" (the most common self-description) identified "students", "workers", "advanced students", and "amateurs", but very seldom referred to themselves as "professionals". Specific expertise was usually referred to by the use of disciplinary labels, "chemist", "palaeontologist", etc. The use of these and other terms will be examined with the purpose of understanding the boundaries which were maintained, and the principles of inclusion and exclusion which were expressed by different groups within the scientific community. The analysis will be based on diverse sources, including presidential addresses to the British Association, articles in the general periodical press, and personal letters.

Gary S. Belkin Harvard University
Crossing Disciplines: Using History to Change Bioethics

Interest in how history of science shapes and is shaped by other fields of history or allied areas of scholarly interest, usually stop short of directly considering how the field can and should shape the very practices it studies. As an historian of medicine and a physician involved in an official capacity as an "ethicist," bioethics offers a compelling illustration of the challenges and benefits to both history and its subject when the former is purposefully used as a concrete resource in the conduct of the latter. This paper takes two current disputes in bioethics-- assisted suicide and valid consent to research in pscyhiatry, and places them in the context of histories and historiographical disputes around medical authority, the nature of futility, and human experimentation. I argue that a certain use of history can not only enrich bioethics but help solve debilitating shortcomings in that discipline.

Anna Binnie Macquarie University, NSW
From Atomic Energy to Nuclear Science

The Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) was established by an act of parliament in 1953 and ceased to exist, again by an act of parliament in 1987 when it was replaced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). During its history the organisations' directions and research focus was very much dependent on what the government of the day saw as the role of atomic energy or nuclear science in Australian society. This paper will trace the story of the developments of the organisations which had their inception in the early years of the second world war, why the direction of the AAEC was changed into ANSTO and research foci of the organisations over the last 47 years of Australia's history. It will look the role played by the oganisations in uranium exploration and mining, atomic energy research and the developments of nuclear science and technology in Australia. Reference will be made to the impact of uranium mining on such issues as aboriginal land rights. It will also discuss some of the reasons why Australia which has the largest uranium deposits in the world does not have a single nuclear power reactor. The paper will conclude with a short synopsis of the research, developments and applications carried out by the organisations at its research site at Lucas Heights near Sydney.

Geoffrey Cantor University of Leeds
Rhetorics of Concord and Dissonance

The study of 'Science and Religion' has been dominated by propositional analysis on the one hand many authors have sought to identify propositions that are to be found in both domains while, on the other, numerous other writers have emphasised the negation of religiously-based assertions by scientific facts. Such strategies seem unobjectionable if science is taken to consist of empirically-justified propositions. However, with the decline of positivism as a philosophy of science and the increasing appreciation of the role of rhetoric in science, new and potentially insightful approaches beckon. In this paper two forms of linguistic analysis will be explored, drawing principally on examples from nineteenth-century British authors. First, the vocabulary of science and religion will be analysed to show how words and meanings have been negotiated across these two (often overlapping) domains. Thus, for example, appeals to the 'laws of nature' were frequently given a theological gloss that aligned them with God's laws. Second, the language of design will be analysed to show that such arguments were not taken simply as inductive forms of reasoning that led from the claims about the natural world to the conclusion that God is it benevolent Creator. Instead the articulators of design arguments often deployed standard rhetorical strategies that carried emotional charge and would thus carry conviction. These examples illustrate two ways in which historians can develop the study of Science and Religion in new and challenging directions.

Paromita Chakravarti Jadavpur University, Calcutta
Juan Huarte's Examination of Men's Wits, 1594 and the Historiography of Mental Disability

My paper seeks to examine and evaluate the role of Juan Huarte's Examination of Men's Wits,[translated into English from the Italian version of the originally Spanish text (Baeza, 1575) by Richard Carew in 1594]in our understanding of the social history of mental disability in Renaissance England. The current academic interest in the evolution of notions of idiocy is focussed largely on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although some work has been done on the legal (Richard Neugebauer)and institutional provisions (Peter Rushton, Jonathan Andrews) for idiots in the sixteenth century and on the literary representations of Renaissance folly (Enid Welsford, Sandra Billington), little or no account is taken of the medical discourse on mental deficiency prior to Thomas Willis' De anima brutorum (Oxford, 1672. My paper will investigate how, many of the revolutionary changes in Enlightenment ideas about idiocy, generally attributed to Willis, have antecedents in sixteenth century medical thought, particularly in Huarte's influential treatise which was translated into seven languages and reissued seventy times before 1700. The work is remarkable in its attempts at rationalising unusual mental functioning by explaining it as a somatic rather than a spiritual condition associated with either divine protection or demonic possession. Although he is writing within the basic parameters of humoural psychopathology, Huarte suggests that the brain and its temperature determines levels of intelligence and in so doing, anticipates Willis' claims about the central role of the brain and the nervous system in mental disturbance and disability. The aim of the paper is not merely to see Huarte as a progressive, even precocious precursor of Willis, but to locate important continuities between Humanist and Enlightenment thinking about idiocy. This would be done through a comparative analysis of the two English translations of Huarte, the 1594 version by Carew and the later 1698 translation by Edward Bellamy. The seventeenth century translation marks a revived interest in an older text containing ideas similar to those being discussed in contemporary debates about the medical causes of idiocy, the problem of categorising the mentally disabled and about their social role. Huarte's work bridges two ages. It is hoped that a discussion of his book and its afterlife would provide a caveat against Foucaultian historiography which sees the seventeenth century as marking an absolute watershed in the history of mental deviance.

Tobias Cheung University of Tokyo
Cuvier's Heritage: Living Architecture between Natural Burdens and Regulative Devices

Cuvier constructs organic bodies to reconstruct their living architecture. As a comparative anatomist, Cuvier designs innumerable models and defines their laws of construction. In modelling the three dimensional inner space of animal caves perspectively, he works with bones, tendons and tubes to distribute the burdens prescribed by the nature of space itself: A heavy weight has to have stable legs as the columns of its bodily balance, supposed that its maniëre de vivre needs such a balance for its existence. Constructivist architecture is thus functional, and constructed for a certain end. But Cuvier's architecture of the living has also to consider the dynamic of repetitive processes within the animal "stove" which moves particles continuously from the inside to the outside, and back again into the cave. The "stove" requires a plan which includes a kind of organizational code, a program, for its regulative role. This deep aspect of the plan has itself no perspective deepness or physical weight, but exposes a topology of regulative devices which structure the movement of points within the time frame of the living processes. Between natural burdens and regulative devices, a set of conceptual tensions frames an ensemble which I will call Cuvier's heritage.

Paul C. Chrostowski CPF Associates, Inc.
Public Perception of the Evolution of the Dose-Response Relationship in Toxicology

In antiquity, substances taken into the human body were classified as either foods or poisons by both lay and professional communities. During the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment, natural philosophers proposed the concept of the dose-response relationship as exemplified by Paracelsus' dictum, "the dose makes the poison." From this point to the present, there has been a division between professional and lay communities where the public conceives of "poison" as an absolute attribute of a substance and scientists conceive of "poison" as a matter of degree. Because toxicology is used as the basis of much current environmental and consumer product regulation, this difference in perception has contributed to loss of confidence in governmental regulatory agencies by the public. This paper explores the divergence of public and professional attitudes toward the dose-response relationship from antiquity to the present concluding with 20th Century concepts such as risk assessment and the precautionary principal which are basic tenets of regulatory policy. The concepts are illustrated with examples drawn from some common and some not-so-common poisons.

Nani N. Clow Max Planck Institut for the History of Science, Berlin
The Indispensable Research Staff: Collaborative Experiment and Laboratory Culture in Liverpool, 1881-1900

The British physicist Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), is often referred to as the quintessential "Maxwellian" experimentalist who replicated, transformed, and popularized Hertz's experiments on the production and detection of electromagnetic waves, who participated in the development of wireless telegraphy (radio), and who conducted several experiments to detect the supposed 'drag' of the ether with the movement of the earth. What is less commonly known is that the majority of Lodge's experiments were designed, created and performed by a collaborative effort between Lodge and his laboratory team in Liverpool in the 1880s and 1890s. This 'team' (averaging a total seven people) included demonstrators, assistant-lecturers, laboratory-assistants, private research assistants as well as other, more invisible participants, such as the laboratory boys' (servants) and advanced research students. The structure of Lodge's laboratory functioned very much like a factory, with the workers being well trained in Lodge's views on Maxwellian theory, techniques of experimenting, and methods of problem solving. Though part of a nominal hierarchical laboratory structure, Lodge's staff members were capable of performing virtually every laboratory task: from glass blowing, performing demonstration experiments, calibrating precision instruments, to designing and building the complicated and highly sensitive experiments that were part of Lodge's experimental program. This paper will examine how Lodge created a community of trust, credibility, and skill within his laboratory and will study how experimental results were then communicated to the outside world. It will demonstrate that Lodge's scientific reputation and credibility was entirely relied upon the unproblematic functioning of his collaborative laboratory and will argue that his credibility could not be separated from the laboratory itself. Although his experimental practice was collaborative, the demonstration (and reception) of these results to both scientific and public audiences mainly centered upon Lodge himself. Thus, the collaborative nature of experimental practice vanished in the public display of science.

Benjamin R. Cohen Virginia Tech
On the Two Temperaments of Science and the Humanities: Those that Bridge the Divide and Those That Blur

This paper examines the relative position of C.P. Snow's two-cultures debate in terms of contemporary characterizations of science, culture, and the humanities. It views Snow's articulation as resting on a particular view of science that has been elaborated and superceded by science studies. Snow took the view that science, being forward thinking, could lead to a better world, whereas the humanities (specifically, the literary humanities) could not. The idea of those 'two cultures' in society has been present since well before Snow's isolation of the issue in the late 1950s. This specific invocation of the issue took place in Cold War Britain, when science was still portrayed as superior, objective, and privileged. That is, the original lecture was historically situated before the post-Kuhn era of science studies had introduced new, sophisticated analyses of the practice and influence of science in and on society. Since then, science has been viewed in light of its relative claim to knowledge. The contributors to science studies - including constructivist histories, Kuhnian studies of non-cumulative progress, and elaborated sociological perspectives - took as their charge the need to understand how science is made and how it works in society. As such, in the intervening years, the divide of two-cultures has been either bridged or blurred by such fields as the history of science, sociology, anthropology, and literature and science. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary approach of science studies has reevaluated the entire premise of two sorts of intellectual inquiry, wherein the divide now lives within science studies, instead of science studies living across the divide.

I. Bernard Cohen Harvard University
Translating Newton's Principia

Newton's Principia presents a hurdle to readers in the new millennium because it is written in Latin and deals with a difficult subject. Our version had two seemingly contradictory goals--to make Newton's text available for readers of the new millennium while preserving its seventeenth-century character. We did not want Newton's text to have the form of a 21st century treatise. Another problem was the commentary. We followed the advice of colleagues, presenting Newton's text in Newton's words without extensive footnote annotations, incorporating explanatory comments into a preliminary "Guide to the Principia," organized so that reader can easily find a section or propositions under study. Thus the reader can study Newton's text with or without editorial aid. As translators-interpreters (every translator is an interpreter), we were awed by awareness that we would become responsible for discussions of Newton in the new millennium. We were encouraged, however, by the warm encouragement and enthusiasm of colleagues. These colleagues read either all or portions of the "Guide" and the translation and generously sent us detailed comments, criticisms, and suggestions for revision. The result was a text that is, in a very real sense, the work of many scholars. In my presentation I give examples of some pitfalls that beset a translator of Newton's Principia, demonstrating why a new translation was needed for the students in the 21st century. I shall conclude with some comments on future research needs and problems for the new millennium.

Peter Denton University of Winnipeg
Framing the Discourse: Science, Religion and the Hermeneutics of 'the Book'

Following Francis Bacon's declaration (The Advancement of Learning, 1605) that God revealed His divine will in both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, the metaphor of the 'two books' has commonly been used to capture the encounter between Science and Religion. As scholarship on l'histoire du livre makes clear, the act of printing is a dynamic and culturally-constrained activity, such that the product of that activity - the book - is a construction of much more than paper, ink and glue. This paper will explore the idea that, from its first articulation early in the history of print culture, the metaphor of the 'two books' has framed the discourse about science and religion in ways that result from the hermeneutic associated with viewing the book as an artefact. It will demonstrate how elements associated with the making and reading of books have shaped the relation between what has become known as Science and Religion, thereby framing discourse about knowledge, meaning and authority in terms which are contingent rather than necessary. Finally it will suggest alternative ways of framing this discourse outside the 'hermeneutics of the book'.

Lawrence S. Dritsas Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
The Nile Sources: Rereading the Journals of Discovery

This paper examines the events that led to the determination of the source of the Nile River in Central Africa. Captain John Hanning Speke is often credited with the discovery made while traveling with Captain Sir Richard F. Burton during 1857-1859. Using the explorers' own journals, it can be shown that the 'discovery' of Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile on 3 August, 1858 is based far more on conjecture than on physical evidence. Speke and Burton's personal opinions of Central African geography and their assessments of the truthfulness of local peoples' geographic knowledge contributed heavily to the observation reports they made at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The nature of discovery is questioned: can a claim be made for all the wrong reasons and still be correct? The subsequent debate between Speke and Burton demonstrates that discoveries are credited to individuals for many reasons beyond evidence alone.

Otniel E. Dror Getty Research Institute
Purity and Danger: Sympathy, Antipathies, and the Boundaries of Science

This paper studies the boundaries of science in early twentieth-century biomedicine. It draws on Mary Douglas' model of "Purity and Danger" to argue that emotion functioned as a conceptual pollutant that demarcated between the laboratory (pure) and the world (danger) the experimenter (pure) and his assistants (danger) and consensus (pure) and controversy (danger). Emotion defined these borders and implied a hierarchy. Each of these antithetical pairs is studied and it is argued that experimenters and clinicians differentiated between science and non-science by constructing emotional gradients on different levels of the laboratory and clinic. The paper then focuses in greater depth on the notion of "consensus" and examines how emotion was implicated in the breakdown of consensual knowledge among members of the scientific community. Emotions disrupted consensual knowledge, but they also resolved tensions by providing a rational for controversy. Thus, emotion ultimately relieved the tensions that controversy entailed. The paper ends by demonstrating that experimenters and clinicians negotiated the tensions that emerged when emotions became a focus of laboratory discourse and praxis by constructing a complex relationship of sympathies and antipathies with emotions inside the spaces of knowledge production.

Sven Dupré University of Gent
Instruments and Embodiment in Art and Science

The recent stress on procedures, instruments and embodiment in the history of science makes a reassessment of the interaction between the history of art and the history of science necessary. While for several decades, under the influence of Santillana, art and science focused on the intellectual content of art, with an almost exclusive attention to the mathematical codification of linear perspective, I will argue that art and science today has more to gain from a study of the painter's workshop practice. The attention to workshop practice, in art and science alike, reshapes the disciplinary boundary between the history of art and the history of science, even to the extent that this boundary tends to vanish, in agreement with the historical absence of a disciplinary boundary between art and science in the Renaissance and the early modern period. The gain should be that anachronistic questions, from the type "what's the influence of art on science?", are avoided to be raised in favor of more to the point questions about the shared embodiment and skill in the workshop of the "scientist" and the "artist". The possibilities opened up by the latter kind of research will be explained by taking examples of an analysis of Galileo's optics and optical instruments against the background of previous workshop practice.

Hamed A. Ead Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
Earliest Chemical Manuscripts of the Chemical Arts in Old Egypt

In spite of Egypt is generally recognized as the mother of the chemical and alchemical arts, but unfortunately her monuments and literature have left little of the early records, which explain these arts. Some of these ideas have been transmitted to us through Greek and Roman sources but the character of these sources do not enable us to discriminate between the matter derived from Egypt and the confused interpretation or additions of the early Greek alchemists. However, fortunately there have been saved to our times two important Egyptian works on chemical processes (Papyrus X of Leyden and Stockholm Papyrus); the earliest original sources on such subjects discovered at Thebes (South Egypt), and both formed part of a collection of Egyptian papyrus manuscripts written in Greek and collected in the early years of the nineteenth by Johann d'Anastasy, vice consul of Sweden at Alexandria, Egypt.

James W. Endersby University of Missouri
Collaboration, Authorship, and Scientific Research: Trends and Patterns among Disciplines

The reward structure within the scientific community emphasizes publication credit, perhaps even over theoretical breakthroughs. This system of incentives produces many peculiarities inherent to the research process. Derek de Solla Price (1963, 1986) and Robert Merton (1968) made early contributions to the study of patterns of collaboration and coauthorship among scientists and within disciplines of science. Although there are a number of research efforts regarding authorship within individual disciplines, few investigators compare patterns of collaboration among several disciplines (Endersby 1996 is an exception but is limited to the social sciences). Current research has said little about changes in the nature and the incidence of collaboration over time and in different disciplines. This paper examines coauthorship for published research among disciplines in the sciences "biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and others" focusing on differences with one another and across time. We classify credited authorship for every article in a dozen preeminent journals in the natural sciences over a 30-year period and identify trends in multiple authorship. The paper concludes with discussion of the growth of big science‚ and how credit-claiming is necessary and encouraged by changes of characteristics within a scientific community. We suggest how demand for authorship influences the nature of scientific research and how the history of scientific collaboration sheds light on the future of several disciplines.

Jim Endersby Cambridge University
Putting Plants in their Place: Joseph Hooker and the Making of Amateurs

Although Joseph Dalton Hooker announced his commitment to natural selection in 1859, in the introduction to his Flora Tasmaniae, a close reading of his essay reveals an apparent ambivalence towards Darwin's theory. However, I will argue that this is not a reluctance to embrace natural selection, but is a product of conscious equivocation over Darwinism's implications. Hooker was concerned with "putting plants in their place" -- taxonomically, geographically and professionally -- all of which are inextricably inter-linked with mid-nineteenth century field collecting practices (especially their imperial/colonial context). Hooker relied on non-expert colonial collectors to provide specimens for his major floras, but this reliance conflicted with his desire to become a "philosophical botanist" (manifested particularly in his biogeographical and taxonomic theories). This tension was heightened by his anxiety over the status of botany as a discipline. Tracing the relationships between taxonomy, philosophical botany and disciplinary status provides a sense of what Hooker was attempting to do, and re-casts certain aspects of the "professionalisation" debate. I intend to argue that the newly-minted "professional" has to be defined in contrast to an equally novel role of "amateur" and that for Hooker, the latter were usually defined as colonials; their geographical isolation and lack of access to books and herbaria being just two of the factors that allowed him to set himself apart from them. Yet at the same time they were essential to his botanical enterprise. Putting plants in their place inevitably becomes a process of putting colonial collectors in their place as well.

Linda E. Endersby University of Missouri
The "Stepchildren" of Science: Engineers and Technology in the Hallowed Halls of Science Museums

The United States experienced rapid changes from the mid-nineteenth century, when the Smithsonian Institution was founded, to the late nineteenth century, when the Field Museum was founded. New groups, such as scientists and engineers, professionalized and the impact of the industrial revolution and technology in America became more pervasive. Technology attracted great popular attention. This paper argues that, while technology excited the popular imagination, it held little sway in the institutions of science such as the museums of the Smithsonian. By the time of the founding of the Field Museum, technology found its way into the museum but was pushed out within the first decade. Technology's popular status may have even been an obstacle to its entrance into the museum world. Forces outside institutions, such as the Smithsonian, pushed technology inside in small bits. This paper describes the obstacles to those forces and argues that outside groups, such as engineers, turned some of those obstacles to advantage and managed to find a small, but permanent, place in the Smithsonian, although not a permanent place at the Field. The paper also examines why the outcomes at the two major science museums differed.